Clay Anderson, KD5PLA, had the first-ever Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact with a Chinese school

First ARISS contact with a school in China hailed as a huge success

On Sunday, August 26, the first Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact with a Chinese school was performed with youth from Nanjing No. 3 High School in Nanjing, Jiangsu.

Twenty students spoke with astronaut Clay Anderson, KD5PLA. Twenty questions were asked and answered, as approximately 300 students and parents looked on.

A vice-director of MII (Chinese FCC) was present during the contact, as well as a vice mayor of Nanjing and a group of 60 local government officials.

Mr. Chen, BA1HAM, and Mr.Tong, BA1AA, two of the veterans in Chinese Amateur Radio Society, also attended. Local hams and businesses supported the students with the contact.

ARISS Chairman Frank Bauer, KA3HDO, was invited to speak via teleconference to the students and other participants prior to the contact.

Ten television stations, including local, provincial, and national stations, as well as another television team from Hong Kong reported on the event. The news story was also picked up by several radio stations, and was broadcasted live in several provinces across China. It was also covered by thirty newspapers.

Live video of the contact was also available on sina.com and qq.com, which are two major internet news portals in China, and they also put the contact on their front pages as featured reports. A headline about the upcoming school contact in China was posted on the MSN startup window, so every Chinese MSN messenger user would see this notice.

Many other websites published their own press releases. Through all media avenues, more than 100 million people were reached!

The audio for this event was fed into EchoLink AMSAT (101 377), JSDXC (337 784) and JK1ZRW (277 208) servers, receiving 106 connections from 10 countries, of which five were repeater nodes. (A fourth server in Bangkok was also used, although it was not monitored for connections.) The audio was also fed into the IRLP Discovery Reflector 9010 and received 5 connections and another 9 picked up on the streaming audio.

Several press releases may be viewed on the following sites:
http://www.lifeofguangzhou.com/node_10/node_37/node_85/2007/
08/20/118757580225767.shtml

www.nanjing.gov.cn/pub/english/today/njnew/society/
200708/t20070808_219253.htm

http://en.0437.gov.cn/dispArticle.Asp?ID=1581

http://nanjingbbs.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7973

http://english.qianlong.com/article1.jsp?oid=23244189

http://en.implight.net/node/54595

http://www.ariss.cn/ (video)

Source: Radio Amateurs Canada