ARISS School Contact Schedule

The ARISS (a joint effort of AMSAT, the ARRL, NASA, the ARISS international partners including Canada, Russia, the European Partners, and Japan) operations team wishes to announce the following very tentative schedule for ARISS school contacts.

This schedule is very fluid and may change at the last minute. Remember that amateur radio use on the ISS is considered secondary. Please check the various AMSAT and ARISS webpages for the latest announcements.

The ARISS contacts can be heard by listening for the ISS on the downlink of 145.80 MHz as well as checking MSNBC.com for possible live retransmissions

The crossband repeater has been active at times.
The frequencies are uplink of 437.80 MHz and downlink of 145.80 MHz.

For information about educational materials available from ISS partner space Agencies, please refer to links on the ARISS Frequently Asked Questions page.

There are several ARISS web sites:
English: http://www.rac.ca/ariss/
French: http://c.avmdti.free.fr/ariss/index.htm
ARISS Europe: http://www.ariss-eu.org/
ARISS Japan: http://www.jarl.or.jp/ariss/

The expedition 10 crew on board the ISS is:
Leroy Chiao KE5BRW
Salizhan Sharipov

To let you in on how tough it is to schedule contacts, here are some of the constraints the ARISS mentors must work under:
Each Increment is 26 weeks in length.
For the next increment (10) we may not schedule:
1. Anything the first 3 weeks.
2. During EVA weeks (2 EVAs are scheduled for Increment 10; 2004-12-28 (did not occur) and 2005-02-21)
3. at least 2 weeks prior to the Increment change.
4. no contacts during meal and exercise periods.
5. no contacts during post-sleep and pre sleep (before 0800 UTC and after 1930 UTC)
6. contacts on the day of Progress docking or undocking are circumspect. Five of these events are planned for this increment.

ISS frequencies:
Remember that the ISS radios are not able to correct for Doppler as the frequencies are channelized. So it is up to the ground station to do the Doppler correction.

For 2 meters, the Doppler is about +3kHz at the beginning and goes to about -3kHz at the end. For 70 cm, the Doppler is about +10kHz at the beginning and goes to about -10kHz at the end. The 70cm Doppler is roughly 3 times the 2m Doppler. Many of the tracking programs have the ability to calculate the Doppler.

Rockland District High School, Rockland, ME, direct via W1PBR
Contact was successful Mon 2005-02-14 15:06 UTC
Congratulations Rockland and Leroy!

St. John's School, Houston, Texas via W5RRR
Contact is a go for Wed 2005-02-23 14:35 UTC

The following contacts are planned but the specific dates have not yet been announced:

Bentley School, Oakland, California, telebridge via TBD
Rains High School, Texas direct via KD5OMH.

St Martins Lutheran School, Mt Gambier, Australia, telebridge via VK5ZAI

S.C.O.P.E. Science & Technology Center, Texas direct via W5LRU or KB5YAM.

Maple Avenue Elementary, Goffstown, NH, direct via KB1GDA
Ft. Ross, Cazadero, CA, direct via WA6M.

Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver, Colorado, direct via N0VSE

Currently the ARISS operations team has a list of 60 schools that we hope will be able to have a contact during 2005.
As the schedule becomes more solidified, we will be letting everyone know. Current plans call for an average of one scheduled school contact per week.

[ANS thanks Charlie, AJ9N for the above information]

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