On Wednesday, October 7 2020 at 14:18 UTC, there was a successful ARISS contact between students from McConnell Middle School, Loganville, GA, USA and ISS Commander Chris Cassidy, amateur radio call sign KF5KDR. For this multi-point telebridge contact Chris Cassidy used the ARISS Interoperable Radio System (IORS) which is installed in the Columbus module. Exceptionally, this ARISS contact was made on UHF frequency 437.525 MHz with ISS callsign OR4ISS and telebridge station ON4ISS (Aartselaar, Belgium).
The multi-point telebridge school contact with McConnell Middle School happened simultaneously with the ARISS SSTV event on 145,800 MHz. Therefore, the UHF frequency was used for this telebridge contact. Telebridge station ON4ISS operators were Jan, ON7UX and Stefan, ON6TI.
ARISS is pleased to receive reports on its activities. As you can see in Mic’s report, this can be done with a simple setup. Due to the low elevation from where Mic IU2LXR received the ARISS radio contact, she was able to monitor both the SSTV activity and the ARISS contact for 7 minutes. After this ARISS contact with McConnell Middle School, the IORS in the Columbus module was set to 145.825 MHz in APRS packet mode.
Media source:
Youtube: McConnell Middle School Space Chat 10-7-2020
ARISS News Release No. 20-19
ARISS Interoperable Radio System (IORS)