What use is an F-call?

Amateur Radio is everywhere, sometimes in surprising places.

You might recall that a while ago I mentioned that I was looking into space communications, specifically I was interested in the communications coming from the Voyager probes. In 2006 a group of AMSAT-DL Amateurs in Germany used a 20m dish at Bochum to track and receive data from Voyager 1. In case you're wondering, that transmission was on 8.415 GHz, so not something you might achieve with your hand-held, unless you build a transverter in your spare time.

Closer to home in time, ISEE-3, or currently known as the International Cometary Explorer ICE will be visiting Earth on its heliocentric orbit in August 2014. It's using two 5 Watt S-band transponders and NASA cannot talk to it any more because the equipment that was part of the Deep Space Network that was able to, was decommissioned in 1999.

If you're interested, you can have a go, in fact, all the specifications are published online, and if you're curious, AMSAT-DL has again risen to the task and achieved contact.

Perhaps we need to go and have a chat with the folks at the Carnarvon Space and Technology Museum. They have a spare dish just waiting for a purpose.

Amateur Radio, it's everywhere.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB