 Testing 123 this is Greg Horton. Hello. My name is Greg Horton kilo six x-ray Sierra Sierra. And welcome to the ham radio village. As part of def con. I'm here today to talk about how to listen to the International Space Station with a $30 radio. I'm an infosec professional by day. I've been interested in radio for over a decade, but it's pretty intimidated about taking a ham radio exam. I thought I wasn't smart enough to do it. It seemed hard. But then when the pandemic hit, I said, what better time to then to do that since they were doing online testing. So I got my license in September of 2020 last year, and I rushed and got my general because I really wanted to get on to HF and do that and I've had my general since then. Other pandemic passions have been gardening and finding whatever free fruit trees I can in my neighborhood and picking them. And as you can see, here's me. This is me on on one of the field days that for UHF and VHF in the past year. So a quick primer. You probably know what ham radio is but just so we're using the same terms. Ham radio refers to amateur radio operators as licensed by the FCC, utilizing allocated frequencies, the FCC gives us as ham radio operators, some frequencies to use with some some limits and rules. If we pass a test that that shows our competency to use those in a responsible manner. Which frequencies are we talking about. Well, this is the main stuff that you'll have to worry about with ham radio we have 70 centimeters, which is 420 to 450 megahertz, which we call UHF or ultra high frequency. And this is VHF, which is 144 megahertz to 148 megahertz, we call that two meter. And this all refers to the length of the, the, the waves. And then your HF is your 10 meters through 160 meters. It's a very large chart of all the bands that we are allocated by the FCC so there's some other things on here that I didn't cover like six meters. There's some stuff also in 2200 meters. I don't know anybody with a radio that can do that, but if you're one of those people hit me up. I'm a little curious of what what you do there. This is like the amateur radio bands, which we can we can utilize to given your, your different licensing. So radios, a big thing about getting into ham radio is that like, it's a good hobby to spend money radios can be really expensive, you can spend a lot of money very quickly on some nice equipment. The handheld radios are often expensive too. They're usually over $100. So the barrier to entry is like okay well I get my license and now I have to, you know, get a radio and figure out what I want and you're going to be spending, you know, 100 200 bucks easily. But a few years ago Chinese company brought a cheaper to the market a cheaper option. Enter the bow thing. That's basically the bow thing UV fire. Now, you can find these pretty much anywhere I find them on wish.com Amazon.com eBay, and they're 30 to 50 bucks roughly if you're paying more than 50 bucks you're probably paying too much. They have four watt radios, they can transmit and receive on UHF and VHF. They don't have the same limits that most radios have, like, most of the radios you buy will prevent you from transmitting on say the police band, the bow thing doesn't do that. So be careful. People hate these radios because of their build quality but honestly, if you're looking for an easy way to get into ham radio, you can't beat the bow thing. It's going to give you what you need it's going to give you your basic functionality, it and and get you on the air, which is that's all that matters. But you know the bow thing is all over the internet and you can find some really absurd ads for them. This one for example is claiming that this little handheld radio is 120 watts. I would not hold a radio that can produce 120 watts to your head very often. You might might have a bad time. Here's a quick little meme. The FCC being afraid of cheap handheld radios. Yeah, they're cheap. They're, they're, they're useful. And yeah, if you if you don't have a radio I strongly suggest just getting one you can even use it as a scanner even if you're not licensed yet, and you can't transmit. So, okay, so that's radios. So what's a repeater. So we have these little tiny handheld radios and they can get our signal maybe a block or two to another person. And that's all on all in good if all you want to do is pretend like you're using a walkie talkie. But say if I want to use my handheld radio to go 50 miles. How am I going to do that. Well, different radio clubs will set up a repeater, which will take your signal and rebroadcast it on a slightly different frequency. That will propagate your signal that much further. And so the local club in my town maintains a repeater and we have regular net nets on on the repeater where we where we talk, but enables us to get pretty far out and and contact each other when normally I would be, I would be just my, my local neighborhood, when it comes to having a handheld radio so this is, it's a pretty nice thing that an element of ham radio. And guess what, there's a repeater on the international space station, isn't that cool. So you can, if you get your signal up to the international space station, it'll broadcast it back down at a different frequency. And that means that you can, you can contact people I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area through the ISS repeater, I can hear people from Arizona. That's amazing with something that's like the size of my hand. You know, this is a picture of the international space station and where the radios are are located. There's a Kenwood on the Russian side of the ISS and an Ericsson on the European side. So how do you listen to the international space station. Well, here are some of the frequencies. So the you, the VHF and UHF repeater downlink is at 437.80. So that's how you would listen to it. So if you just want to listen to people on it. That's fine. The uplink is how you would transmit is at 145.99 with a PL of 67 Hertz. The voice and in slow scan TV downlink is 145.80 and that's worldwide. And the voice uplink is 144.49 for it regions two and three so that's the Americas and the and the Pacific and Southern Asia. When you're dealing with the International Space Station, turn off your squelch. You don't want squelch to get in the way of you if you're catching a signal. And because the International Space Station is going over you. You may not have that long of a time to actually catch the signal. So turn off the squelch entirely when you're trying to listen. So I mentioned slow scan television. Yeah, you can send images. Well, you can receive images. The, the International Space Station does regular events where they will do special commemorative images that that you can pick up while, while the International Space Station passes over you. So if you have a your radio and you have a cell phone that has a slow scan television program, you can just pick up that signal and it'll produce a photo for you. This is one from when they were commemorating Russian cosmonauts on the ISS. There was recently one for for the June field day that they did, and I was able to get one of those images while in a moving car with a handheld radio. Pretty neat. So how do you track. How do you know when the ISS is over you and how do you track it. This is ISS detector, and it's an Android app, and I set my phone to give me an alert when there's a pass. So it'll, it'll bother me and be like hey in 30 minutes there's going to be an ISS pass and then I'll go okay, I'll try to try to grab the signal from this one I'll get my antenna out, I'll get my radio out I'll get prepped I'll get out in my yard, and then wait for it to come overhead. I'll get heavens above, which will give you all kinds of information about the, the International Space Station passing over you, and also feature some other amateur satellites. Yeah. So how do you listen. You use your handheld radio, and, or you can get a directional antenna, you can point towards the sky. In the photo on the left, you want to hold your radio at a at this angle. It'll get you a better signal as it's passing over. This won't do as well up and down. Not as good on the right here I'm using an Ed Fong J pole, which is a small PVC pipe antenna with with with a wire J pole on the inside. And this does pretty well I was able to pick up signals and make contacts with it, but it's not directional so you're kind of like dancing around, trying to pick up the signal as it's passing over you. This is a Yagi antenna, though, on the other hand, this one is from arrow intense. This is a directional antenna. So this is like if you know where the ISS is. If it's nighttime you can actually see it passing you can see the blinking lights. You can point this antenna directly at it and then follow it as you go across the sky. And this is going to be your best bet is using a Yagi antenna. You know, you can you can track the ISS you can get an antenna you can point it there. But something here we need to think about also is the pass angle. So a pass angle of 90 degrees is going to be right straight over you. A pass angle of zero degrees is right on the horizon. So there is a range of passes of how you're going to be able to contact the ISS and like the closer to 90 degrees the better the past is going to be for you. And then the longer time that you're going to have to actually pick up the signal, something that's going to be more closer to the horizon, you're going to be blocked by hills you're going to be blocked by buildings. And also the past will be just a few minutes with a 90 degree passes. It's about nine minutes. So you have an enough time to make make some quick contacts with people. So with the pass angles, we also need to talk about some basic physics called the Doppler effect. So those who don't know the Doppler effect is this physics phenomenon where, as a, as a signal is moving away from you, you will perceive it as a at a lower than is than if it's coming at you. And the most common real world example of this is ambulances. So when you hear a loud ambulance pass you or our fire truck, it'll, you know, it'll start at a high frequency and then as it goes it goes that's the Doppler effect. That's physics. Doppler effects also is famous for in astronomy that we can tell that stars are moving away from us because the light on them is blue shifted shifting to a lower frequency. Yeah. So, what is the Doppler effect have to do with us. As with sound or light radio waves are just another form of electro magnetic magnetic radiation. So, with that, we have to adjust our radio to better pick up the signal. Now, you can set it smack dab in the middle of whatever the the frequency is going to be for the International Space Station. And you can make contacts that way. But if you want to have better success, what you're going to want to do is, as it's coming towards you, you're going to want to bump your frequency up by by one kilohertz two kilohertz that you some people do like by five kilohertz steps, or megahertz steps. Just to kind of grab the signal. And then as it's going away from you you will adjust your radio to to go the other direction to go lower. This is just to take into account for the for the Doppler effect. Yeah, this is an example in like chirp of how you could program this. So as you can see in the frequency column we have some frequencies there that take into account the Doppler effects you can switch through them quickly as the passes is is making its way. And here's some more examples of what what frequencies you might want to hit when when dealing with the with the Doppler effect. This is for the ISS voice downlink. And the packet downlink and uplink. And this is for the voice crossband downlink and uplink so this is the the repeater frequencies. So, talking a lot about a repeater on the ISS but I don't want to contact other hands I just want to hear astronauts. Well, good luck. Hearing astronauts is very rare astronauts. The ham radio program is in a part of like their everyday work. It's something that they do for fun. So catching an astronaut is, is a lot of luck. Astronauts will plan contacts with schools. So that's actually a really good way for to hear the astronauts is if you want to pay attention to the station ham radio website, they'll tell you when they're when they're doing a contact with the school, and if it's a school near you, you can catch it and listen to it. Don't try to, you know, interrupt that because they are they are making a contact for their their school program, of course. But yeah, that's a fun way to listen to it and you might get lucky if you listen to the voice. The voice frequency sometimes there is is astronauts I've never heard any, and I have heard of one person who a friend of a friend. They were able to make a successful contact with an actual astronaut. Most of the time you're going to be you'll you'll use this for the repeater, and so you'll be able to contact other other hands. And the contacts are very quick. So, when I'm making a contact through the ISS repeater. I'll be like K6 XSS Charlie Mike 88, I make 88 is my grid square. K6 XSS Charlie Mike 88, and then somebody will be like, you know, respond with their call sign and their grid square, and then I'll be like 73, you know, QSL. And then that'll be logged as a as a as a quick contact. If you get one or two contacts during a pass, that's pretty good. I'm especially if you're running a handheld radio at only like for four or five months. If you want to have better success, run more once use something that's more of a base station. If you really wanted to get advanced, you could get a yogi antenna that was on a rotator and pointed at the at the, at the, where you where the ISS is going to be and then follow it as it passed. I don't know anybody doing that but that was that's how I would do it. But I definitely have. I have friends who who do ISS contacts who just do it from their base station and they run, you know, 20 to 25 watts, and they're able to make a lot of successful contacts. It's much harder to do it with a handheld radio, but I have done it, and you can do it. So all this information about contacting the International Space Station. It's not just for the International Space Station. So amateur radio operators, like, like myself, like they can do their own amateur radio satellites. They, you know, they are repeaters as well they're flying around space, they pass a little bit differently like their, their passes are a little quicker sometimes because they're faster. But yeah, it's the same, it's the same stuff so the, the ISS detector app that I mentioned that is for Android also supports some of the amateur radio satellites. You can put those in as well and get get get get contacted when those are passing over you and you can try to make contacts up with those two. But the ISS is definitely the one that I think more people are know about and are into. So, another thing about the International Space Station and the repeater on it is that it's not always up, and you'll want to check the status of it. Sometimes, like a few months back, they did a spacewalk, and they replaced a cable, and then the same radio was down for a few months happens, you know, you. I'm sure all of us have had that that situation where you replace just you know you're like I'll just replace a bit of wire a cable, you know, and then the whole thing doesn't work and you're like, I shouldn't even have touched it. That's the situation, but they were able to fix it and get it up and running. Again, currently, the, the Kenwood is the one that is that is operational, and it's in packet mode right now so if you do packet radio. This would be a good, good thing for you to play with the next mode change is going to be back to a cross band repeater so using a UHF and VHF repeater. So you have time, you can get your antenna together, you can get your radio together, you can start practicing pointing it outside you can get all of your notifications set up so you can catch a good pass. So we got some time to get ready for when they're when they're back up and running. Thank you. If you want more. If you're not licensed, please get licensed. If you haven't taken advantage of the licensing this weekend. There are lots of groups that are doing licensing online. There's some groups that are that are now starting to do in person licensing again. So please take a look at that. If you have any questions, contact me at K6 XSS at the URL dot org, that'll go to my email, and I have a website I have one article up there about the ISS stuff. It's like in spaces, pretty fun to me. And it's something I want to do more of. So, thank you very much and hope you're having a great def con.