College students contact space station with self-built radio system
By Donald Melanson 
posted February 3rd 2009 3:49PM
posted February 3rd 2009 3:49PM
While putting a call in to the International Space Station and chatting up an astronaut for a full ten minutes would likely be more than enough to satisfy most science classes, a group of students from Humber College in Toronto decided to go one big step further and do so with a radio system that they designed and built themselves. According to the school, that makes it the first time that's ever been done by students at the college level, which provided some well-deserved bragging rights for the students and their instructor, who said that they're "playing way, way above their league." Be sure to hit up the link below for a video of the big moment and, of course, the complete NASA control room-esque geek out.
This would be WAY cooler if it WASN'T allowed/legal.
It's like something out of a mildly good spy movie! :D
... And they didn't Rick Roll them?
Sounds like a waste of time to me.
Off the shelf radios can not use NASA frequencies.
So, they had to modify it...
Frequencies used by the students from their website:
"The frequencies that the space shuttle's radio operates on are:
Voice Downlink: 145.80 MHz
Voice Uplink: 144.49 MHz
Packet Uplink: 145.825 MHz"
And they are bang in the middle of radio amateur band, and usable on a unmodified ic-v8000 that they used.
I can't see anything great here. Ages ago amateur operators built their own radios. Do a search on the arrl site and look for the QST magazines before 1960. Bah.