NASA Night – September 27th 2005
by David Worboys M0ZLB/KG4ZLB
Some 152 schools in the continental United States are members of the
NASA Explorers Program, two of which are located very close to my Amateur
Radio Club’s QTH in Naples, Florida.
NASA Explorer schools enjoy a close relationship with NASA and have access
to educational programs, guest speakers and organised field trips to NASA
facilities.
Some months ago, the Club was approached by the Head of Science at Pine
Ridge Middle School, to see if we would be prepared to facilitate a contact
between school students and the International Space Station as part of
the ARISS program.
A number of the Club’s members are experienced in Satellite communications
and have already QSO’d with the ISS and we readily accepted the
invitation. At the time of writing the school has been notified that it
has jumped the waiting list by two years and we should expect to be notified
of our “window” within the next 12 months and possibly as
soon as 4-6 weeks as we are able to do this on “short-notice”.
 The
School held a “NASA Night” on Tuesday September 27th which
was an event to promote and educate parents, teachers and students not
directly involved with the NASA program.
Our Club was asked to set up an amateur radio demonstration and skeds
were set up with NASA facilities so that students could ask related questions
to the experts.
Seven of us arrived at the School at 2.30pm and proceeded to assemble
the tri-band beam and set it on top of the tower trailer. At that time
of the day we were working in 93 degree heat and direct sun but after
an hour or so the antenna was hoisted and we retired to the comfort of
the air conditioned school and began to assemble the station. Our equipment
consisted of two Icom 746’s (one as a back-up), an Ameritron AL-80B
amplifier, PSU etc. We also had a static satellite communication station
set up for people to look at.
 Our
first contact was with G6UW at Cambridge University in the UK, which caused
a lot of excitement from bystanders not aware of the distances that HF
could cover.
A number of other QSO’s followed into Maine, New York, Kentucky
and Michigan before we established contact with NA6MF, at the NASA
Ames Center in Silicon Valley, California
Ames is a research and development centre for NASA manned space flight
and of course, most students wanted to ask questions about the ISS, the
Space Shuttle etc, not exactly a speciality of Ames. The planned sked
with NASA Kennedy Space Center (where all the answers were!), was problematic
due to skip distance - we were too close). So questions asked were relayed
via Ames in California to KSC and the answer relayed back to us in Naples
– it worked very well!
We operated for 2.5 hour, spent most of the time with Ames and the students
asked a number of questions which were duly answered.
Our final contact was with CE4ATS, Alex running mobile in Santiago, Chile!
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