Reception reports indicate that ARISSat-1/KEDR has stopped transmitting on Wednesday, January 4, 2012. The last full telemetry captured and reported to the ARISSatTLM web site at 06:02:14 UTC on January 4 were received from ground stations as the satellite passed over Japan.

You can view the full telemetry display or the condensed telemetry display.

Telemetry reports showed that the temperature aboard ARISSat-1/KEDR had been rising as atmospheric drag began to affect the satellite. Final temperatures received via ARISSatTLM reported this data:

Konstantin, RN3ZF sent a reception report of his copy of the 0842 UTC pass that, "the telemetry was absent, voice messages were not legible, very silent and interrupted. Most likely, I saw last minutes in the life of the satellite."

Dee, NB2F reported, "Nothing heard from ARISSat-1/KEDR on any frequency during the first USA pass at 16:00 UTC, January 4."

ARISSat-1/KEDR was deployed from the International Space Station on August 3, 2011 during during EVA-29 on by Cosmonaut/Flight Engineers Sergei Volkov and Alexander Samokutyaev.

The satellite carried a student experiment from Kursk State University in Russia which measured atmospheric density. Students from around the world provided the voices for the FM voice announcements.

For more information visit: AMSAT.org

I would like to inform everyone about a few new echolink commands I (KC2UEZ) added to node.
Since winter is coming, I wanted to be able to get the local temperature, forecast and warnings if any.
The commands are:

• 50 Local Time
• 51 Local Weather conditions
• 52 Local Temperature + time when measured
• 53 Local forecast
• 54 Local weather warnings
• 55 Local weather warnings summary
• 56 Local extended weather warnings

For the full list of commands visit: Echolink Info.

The California Near Space Project launched a high altitude weather balloon from San Jose, California 4:00 PM local time Sunday afternoon (Dec 11). Over the past 3 days it managed to cross the United States and then the Atlantic Ocean. The balloon passed the coastline of Spain about 12:40 AM (US Eastern Standard Time) Wednesday morning (Dec 14). It has since popped and landed in the Mediterranean Sea. This is a huge accomplishment. The previous distance record was about 3,300 miles. This one traveled about 6,200 miles. Enthusiasts tracked the balloon via the web throughout most of the trip thanks to a ham radio technology called APRS which received data transmitted by the balloon and logged it to databases on the internet. Thanks to APRS stations around the world (some of whom changed their normal listening frequencies to help with the tracking process) data was available for most of the flight.

Source: Slashdot.org

For those who don’t know. This website has a feature that will allow you to listen to the clubs repeater and other local (and no so local) repeaters in the area. To do this I use a scanner. I take the audio from the scanner encode it and send it to a reflector server. When you click on the Play “” triangle on the navigation bar to the right, your computer connects to the reflector server and plays back the audio from the scanner.

Recently I (KC2UEZ) acquired a new (to me) PRO-2052 Radioshack scanner. I have replaced the old PRO-2030 with this new(er) scanner.

I use the PRO-2052 to stream the audio. The advantage of using this scanner is it can be controlled and programmed over the Internet which opens a great number of possibilities. In addition it can store 1000 frequencies.

I have added a over 300 frequencies of HAM repeaters about 150 miles radios from Johnstown NY, 12095. At the moment it will not receive all the programmed frequencies, but I will relocate the antenna next spring so it can receive all the frequencies.

K2JJI 146.700 is the priority frequency. The scanner will scan and lock-in on a frequency that is busy. If the scanner is locked-in on a frequency and there is traffic on K2JJI, the scanner will give preference to K2JJI and switch to that channel.

For the List of monitored frequencies click here:

continue reading…