ISS Fan Club

Have you clicked on the "Predict passes" link ( http://www.issfanclub.com/tracking/ ) under the map and entered your city? You may have to use a larger nearby city.

Kenneth - N5VHO
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/reference/radio/
Support ARISS http://www.amsat-na.com/store/donation.php (select "Human Spaceflight (ARISS))

yes tried that i use to put in chigwell essex uk
but even if i put in london it comes not found ?
any idears please regards martin m0cmh

Thus far I have not found a great "do it all" program for satcoms, but there are a few that will do a fine job predicting flyovers for you.

Orbitron is my personal favorite -- it'll tell you when rise, peak and set are, and will show you where above you the ISS (or any other sat in its list) will track.

Ham Radio Deluxe is a great program for rig control and digital modes that now has a sat tracker (download the matest beta from the link) and should soon have decode capability for the slow-scan television format we should be seeing from the ISS come next month. The sat tracker program will voice announce when the next rise is, and will show you max elevation, ride and set times, but won't show you a sky track. The voice announce is nice!

There are a number of others, but these two are easy to configure and free downloads. Don't forget to set the Keplerian element update settings fairly short -- I use a max of two days, but I am always connected to the 'net via DSL at my QTH. These are the latest info on where exactly the sats are relative to earth, so the older they are, the more likely it is that they will be off by some amount. This is probably not very critical with something like the ISS on VHF (2m), as you're not going to be trying to aim a high-gain antenna array right at the ISS, nor will you need very precise correction for Doppler effect -- you can probably do fine with a typical 2m rig that has standard 5 kHz minimum tuning steps, and can probably comfortably complete a QSO without having to adjust for doppler at all. IF you plan on getting further into sat work, especially at higher frequencies where doppler effect becomes a significant issue, then having the latest Keplerian elements will be critical.

As a side note for the more advanced folks, Orbitron can drive a variety of rotor control interfaces for az and el, and I think it can do rig control as it calculates doppler for you in real time. I never linked it with my FT-100D (before it died, taking my dreams and dollars with it, and Yaesu gave me the shaft and a lot of made-up contradictory stories about what was wrong with it and who was at fault, even blaming another company for the failure!), but was successful using the displays for manual adjustment for doppler on SSB contacts where there were set up- and downlink frequencies (since I never had a setup allowing full duplex, I was unable to work the birds with wide-band transverters, as I had no way to hear myself!)

-Adam, KI6QYJ, far coastal NorCal, hoping to somehow get back on HF and SSB V/U

Like many I use Orbitron to track the ISS and many other sats, but to have a better idea where to look you need a program called HEAVENSAT.

John

I put in "London, UK" last night and it came up fine for me but now I can't get it to let me put in a different location. Guess there are still a few bugs in the system. Hopefully, the web admin will have some time to work them out.

Kenneth - N5VHO
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/reference/radio/
Support ARISS http://www.amsat-na.com/store/donation.php (select "Human Spaceflight (ARISS))

SSTV is not currently active on ISS. It is being planned for some use during the Oct time period. Downlink frequnecy should be on 145.800.

Kenneth - N5VHO
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/reference/radio/
Support ARISS http://www.amsat-na.com/donation.php (select "Human Spaceflight (ARISS))

Read this today on www.southgatearc.org

ISS SSTV Operations Planned for October 12

The ARISS team received word from ARISS Russia delegate Sergey Samburov, RV3DR, that the current ISS crew expect to transmit SSTV on October 12 from 18:00-21:00 UTC.
This is your opportunity to test out your SSTV reception capability and to post images on the ARISS SSTV Gallery. The planned downlink for this operation will be 145.80 MHz with Robot 36 as the expected SSTV mode of operation.