Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Manual imagery

Charles sent numerous images in rapid succession over Europe during the ~1550 UTC pass. These are manually transmitted so the interval between images will vary and can be extremely short. One of the images from that pass of Charles was captured by PD0RKC. Charles is expected to continue sending images and making random QSOs in addition to the school contacts that are planned during his visit.

Automatic mode

It appears that the VC-H1 has been left on in the window in auto mode after the crew has gone to sleep. This means it should capture and send whatever it can see about once every 3 minutes until the batteries run down. The bad news is for folks where it is night time, only a black image with possible interior reflections will be seen. For the folks in daytime, the image might be of your part of the world as seen out one of the windows in the Russian service module. Once the batteries go low, a purple image with the callsign will get sent and then eventually that will stop.


A recently published image from today showing the faint outline of the Soyuz as the ISS moved into darkness. Image caputured by W2DNR

Monday, March 30, 2009

Simonyi transmitting SSTV during visit

Some initial SSTV images were transmitted today (March 29) by Charles Simonyi using the VC-H1 unit on the ISS. Look for more images during his visit to the ISS.