The Nashua Area Radio Society (NARS), will be hosting a Ham Bootcamp on Saturday, September 7th from 9 AM until noon at the Northeastern HamXposition at Boxboro. Ham Bootcamp includes a series of hands-on activities designed to help newly licensed Technician and General class license holders get on the air and use their amateur radio license. It is also a great opportunity for prospective hams who are interested in seeing what the hobby has to offer….
Ham Bootcamp activities will be provided in two tracks – one for Technicians and prospective hams and one for General class licenses and higher.
Technician Track Activities
Putting together a Station for Repeaters – how to pick an HT and antenna
HT Programming Tutorials and Help
Getting Started with EchoLink
Making a Contact, joining a Repeater Net
Fox Hunting Demonstrations
Making contacts through Amateur Radio Satellites in Space
General Track Activities
Putting together an HF Station
Putting up a simple HF Antenna including coax and grounding choices
Software for your HF station
Operating on the HF bands using voice, morse code, and digital
Putting together a portable HF Station
How to find and work DX and QSL
… and more!
We will also be providing discount coupons for a kit build and for purchases at HRO to Ham Bootcamp participants.
Ham Bootcamp is free and it is available to all HamXpositon 2019 attendees. Participation in the hands-on training is limited to 100 people maximum and will be on a first-come, first-served basis, so arrive early to get a seat. Registration begins at 8 am.
If you are planning to attend the Northeastern HamXpostion 2019 @ Boxboro on September 7th, don’t miss this once-a-year opportunity to learn more about Amateur Radio, improve your station, expand your skills, and get on the air. See you at Ham Bootcamp!
Jamey, AC1DC Presenting in the ARRL Forum at Dayton 2019
The ARRL gave the Nashua Area Radio Society a Forum at the Dayton Hamvention(R)this past year to talk about how we approached Growing and Modernizing our club. The ARRL has produced a video of our Dayton Forum presentation. You can view the Video along with a copy of the presentation via the link which follows…
The Nashua Area Radio Society has grown from about 35 members to over 225 members in less than 4 years. The presentation contains ideas and programs that have worked for the Nashua Area Radio Society’s (NARS) as part of our efforts to modernize and grow our club.
We have been sharing this presentation via the Internet with other Amateur Radio Clubs. All that is required is an Internet connection capable of streaming video and an associated computer with a projector and speakers. We would like to invite our readers who might want us to do a similar presentation at one of your club meetings to reach out to us via an email to ab1oc@arrl.net.
Students and Teacher Ready To Launch Their High-Altitude Balloon
We are planning the fourth launch of our High-Altitude Balloon (HAB-4) this Sunday, June 9th between 10:30 am and 11:30 am ET. We will be launching locally from the Hollis-Brookline HS here in Hollis, NH. Read on to learn more about our HAB projects and how to track our HAB while it is in flight.
It’s to easy to track our HAB! All you need is a web browser and Internet access follow our HAB to the edge of space and back. Check out the article (link above) for more information about our HAB and how to track it.
Like many memorable events in our lives, our journey towards the Hudson Memorial School ISS Crew Contact began in a modest fashion with a telephone call from Dan Pooler at Hudson Memorial School in Hudson, NH. Dan had been to Space Camp where he heard about an ARISS Crew Contact from … Continue reading Journey to an ISS Crew Contact →
Our project to help the students at Hudson Memorial School in Hudson, NH make contact with an astronaut on the International Space Station via Amateur Radio is a memory now. The link above is an article about the more than year-long journey that led to this once-in-a-lifetime experience. I hope you enjoy it and don’t miss the video of our contact towards the end of the story.
We have just received word from our ARISS Mentor, Dave Jordan, AA4KN – Our ISS Crew Contact will take place on Friday, December 7th at approximately 1:45 pm EST. Activities on-site will begin with some videos and station tours before the contact.
We will be using the Nashua Area Radio Society callsign, N1FD, for our contact with NA1SS. We believe that our contact will be with Serena Aunon-Chancellor, KG5TMT. We are all very, very excited to hear the news!
Prioritized ISS Passes for our Crew Contact
This date/time was our second choice and the ISS will be on a good pass reaching a maximum elevation of 48 degrees at Time of Closest Approach (TCA). Our contact with the ISS will last about 10 minutes.
Our plan is to begin the final setup of our equipment on Monday, December 3rd at Hudson Memorial School. We will be Live Streaming the setup and testing of our Station at HMS as well as our actual contact via the Nashua Area Radio Society Facebook page.
We are just awaiting notification of the final date and time for our contact and we’ll begin final setup and testing at HMS.
We’ve been sharing our progress as we’ve on the Nashua Area Radio Society’s Youth Forum as we have worked through our final preparations. I also would like to share a summary here along with some insights on what we’ve learned along the way.
An ISS Crew Contact is No Small Undertaking …
Satellite Station 3.0 Antenna System Test
We have been working for almost a year now to get ready for our contact. We’ve built and tested two space ground stations and we’ve discovered and addressed several performance and reliability issues with these stations during trial deployments at Field Day, Ham Fests, License Classes, and during testing here at our QTH.
Leading the ARISS Crew Contact Application Process for our contact
Integration of Radio Space Science concepts into their student curriculum
A Skype contact with a NASA Engineer
Visiting the Boston Museum of Science special exhibit on Space and the International Space Station
A High Altitude Balloon Project with the Nashua Area Radio Society to learn about Atmospheric Science and Space Communications
Space-related student projects including building rovers, participating in an egg drop, and having their pre-engineering program students work on solutions for the ISS
Holding a Field Astronomy and STEM night for students and building Amateur Radio into the school’s annual STEM Nights
Audio-Visual Elements are Important and as Challenging as the Ground Station Equipment…
Sound System Mixer
We planned from the very start to provide a shared, multimedia experience as part of our contact. Our plans included:
Providing a professional-quality audio and video experience for the students, parents, and faculty members at HMS during our contact
Creating a high-quality Video Capture of our Contact
Dave, K1DLM who is a member of NARS had extensive professional sound experience and was able to help us with this part of our project.
Audio System for ISS Contact
Dave put together a professional-level A-V system design to support our contact and provided much of the gear to realize the design. His uses a pair of communications microphones, a pro-mixer, and audio interface gear to provide student and radio audio to the sound system in the auditorium at HMS as well as to an array of video cameras. The system makes extensive use of XLR cabling and pro-level devices to ensure clean audio.
Video Presence on the Internet is an Important Element to Draw Interest in a Project Such as Ours…
We Live Streamed some of our Station Testing activities to Facebook and we were amazed at the interest and response that we received. Many folks worldwide followed our progress on Facebook in real-time as we set up and completed our full station test.
ISS Antenna Camera Test
We are planning to have two IP Video Cameras Live Streaming to Facebook during our contact. One in the room to provide video of the students as they talk with the astronaut on the ISS and a second on our antennas as they track the ISS.
Its Critically Important to Test the Complete Station Ahead Of Time – New Challenges Emerged when we Mixed Audio and Radio Gear…
Full Station Setup and Test
We set up the full station (Primary and Backup) along with all of the Audio and Video Gear about 3 weeks prior to our contact for a complete system test. We learned a great deal in doing this and we encountered several problems which we have since corrected.
On-Air Station Test
The most important issues did not show themselves until we made some contacts with all of the A-V gear in place. We had problems with RF aggravated ground loops in the radio microphone circuits during the initial test. These problems did not show themselves until we added the audio mixer and sound system into the station.
Audio Isolation Transformer
These problems were easily corrected by adding Audio Isolation Transformers into the radio microphone circuits.
XLR Line to Microphone Level Attenuator
We also solved some potential issues related to level differences between line and microphone audio circuits using Audio Attenuators.
These problems were not difficult to solve but they would have seriously degraded our contact if we had not discovered them early while there was still plenty of time to secure parts and retest.
Data Networks in Schools and Public Places Require Configuration Adjustments to Support Contact Elements…
Data Network Test at HMS
Schools and other public places typically do a good job of protecting their data networks and users from threats from both the Internet and within the venue. Tracking Programs, IP Cameras for Live Streaming, and other contact support gear are not typical devices that would be in operation on such networks. Also, many public venues rely almost exclusively on WiFi for access to the Internet and typically prohibit or severely limit client devices from communicating with each other.
WiFi can often suffer from RF interference issues when many devices like Smart Phones are located together in a small area. This situation is common in large gatherings.
Data System for ISS Contact
We had quite a bit of experience with these problems as part of other school projects we’ve done. We worked closely with the IT staff at HMS to plan for and create a network design to support our contact. We opted to use a wired network approach with a local Ethernet switch to implement the IP communications between the elements in our stations and the associated IP Cameras.
The IT team at HMS configured their network to ensure that the IP addresses of our devices were fixed in DHCP and that devices that needed access to the Internet had the access that they required. The IP cameras where the most challenging elements here.
Packed and Ready to Go…
Equipment Packing and Protection
Well, all of our gear is packed and ready to go for setup on-site at HMS. The next article in this series will cover the on-site set up for our contact.
We are counting down to our ISS crew contact which will take place during the first week in December. Steps in our final preparations are taking place on almost a daily basis now. Several of us visited Hudson Memorial School yesterday to work out final plans for setting up our ground stations and the supporting Audio Visual and Data Systems.
We are also working closely with the ARISS team to finalize our contact details including prioritizing candidate ISS passes, finalizing student questions, etc.
We are posting frequent updates in the Youth Forum on the Nashua Area Radio Society website and I thought that some of our readers here might be interested in seeing these posts too. You can follow the link above to check for what will likely be new updates on our progress every few days.
We have established launch windows and begun final launch preparations for our High-Altitude Balloon 4 (HAB-4) launch. We’ve made some modifications to our HAB platform to improve its cold temperature performance and we’ve determined the Balloon and flight path parameters for the upcoming flight. HAB-4 will carry an APRS transmitter and can be tracked using aprs.fi. You can read more about HAB-4 flight preparations via the link that follows.
You can see more about what we are planning via the link above. Activities will include multiple GOTA Stations, a Kit Build, a Fox Hunt, Morse Code, and other hands-on activities. We will also be operating a Special Event Station as N1T.
The Nashua Area Radio Society put together a successful Amateur Radio Youth Exposition at the New England Amateur Radio Convention at Boxboro this year. Our exposition features over ten displays with hands-on activities…
Anita AB1QB and I are continuing to work along with the Nashua Area Radio Society to encourage young people to become licensed and join the Amateur Radio Service.
