By Miles Mann WF1F, MAREX-NA (Manned Amateur Radio Experiment, North American Division)

ARISS Meeting:
Last month there was an ARISS (Amateur Radio International Space Station) meeting in the Netherlands (Holland).  There were over a dozen representatives from various organizations, AMSAT, IARU and observers from other groups including NASA, ESA and MAREX-NA.  We were all there to discuss the progress of the Amateur Radio projects for the ISS.  The meeting took place at the European Space facility in Noordwijk, Netherlands.  It was good to see a lot of familiar faces again and meet our new partners at ESA. The ARISS group will soon publish some official meeting minutes. 
At the present time the only Amateur radio project which is officially manifested for ISS is the SAREX transportable system.  This system consists of a pair of commercial grade HT's, power supplies, cables headset etc.   The HT's are mono band commercial grade radios, one for 2-meters and one for 70cm.   I have been informed the receiver performance of the commercial gear is much better than standard Amateur Radio equipment.  Good receivers are a requirement on ISS because there will be many commercial transmitters operating on ISS at the same time.
Also, there is always the possibility of intermodulation problems caused by terrestrial transmitters.  (for those of you familiar with the term Intermod-alley, when you are 200 miles up, the QRM from the Intermod-allies is not reduced significantly). During the meeting there were a few project proposals and two product demonstrations of potential candidates for ISS.  The SAFEX team demonstrated a well designed multiband transceiver/repeater, which was specifically designed to operate in a micro-gravity environment.  The new SAFEX transceiver look awesome, it supported Voice and medium speed digital data (72k bit data and higher).
The ARISS team allowed me to present the MAREX-NA SSTV proposal and run a short demo of our current version of SpaceCam1 software.  It seemed that everyone like the project and the growth potential of the project.
At the present time the SpaceCam1 project is still in the proposal category.  I am also planning on showing the same demo at the Dayton Amateur Radio convention this month.

http://www.siliconpixels.com/marex/ISSProjectsIndex.html

MIR Status:
The Russian Space Station is currently manned by Cosmonauts Sergei Zaletin and Alexander Kaleri. Last week the Mir crew found and fixed a troublesome air leak.  In order to find the air leak, the Mir crew had to close the hatch covers to the other  modules to help isolate the problem.  It was eventually found at the cover of the Specter module and fixed.  All of the other module hatches have been reopened.
Another cargo rocket has arrived at Mir.  The progress rocket took off on April 25 and then docked last week. The module contains the usually stuff, food, fuel etc.

(Normal) Mir Crew Sleep / Wake times:
The Mir crew is back to their normal sleep schedule. The Mir crew is using a time Sleep/wake cycle which I will call Mir-Time (MT).  Mir-Time is UTC time plus 3 hours.  Mir-Time does not make any adjustments for daylight-savings time.
Here is a list of an approximate time schedule for the Mir crew.

The Mir crew sleeps from approximately 19:00 UTC, until 04:00 UTC. 
Mir crew is awake and working from approximately 04:00 UTC - 18:00 UTC. 
Another way to think of it is, take the UTC time and add 3 hours to equal Mir-time.

Mir Amateur Radio Status:
Intermittent Voice and SSTV on 145.985 FM Simplex (SSTV mode Robot 36).
We are planing to begin testing the Personal Message System soon (packet mail). There were no reports of any SSTV activity last week.
We are very interested in getting copies of these Mir SSTV JPG images to post on our web pages.  If you received a good high quality image (with out much noise) then could you please send the image directly to MAREX-NA at wf1f@amsat.org
We will save all images and post the best images received each week on our Mir-shots web page.
Please do not send images to large mailing lists such as SAREX or AMSAT because they would bog down the internet too much.  I will post the best on the MAREX-NA web page http://www.siliconpixels.com/marex/mirshots/

Suggested Receiving Station for Satellite SSTV Images.
http://www.siliconpixels.com/marex/MirSSTVStation.htm

MAREX-NA home page
http://www.siliconpixels.com/marex

SSTV Repeaters:
The MAREX-NA team has posted some information regarding testing of the
new
SpaceCam1 SSTV software.
http://www.siliconpixels.com/marex/RepeaterOperations.htm

Copyright 2000 Miles Mann, All Rights Reserved. This document may be freely distributed via the following means - Email (including listservers), Usenet, and World-Wide-Web. It may not be reproduced for profit including, but not limited to, CD ROMs, books, and/or other commercial outlets without prior written consent from the author.
Images received from the MAREX-NA SSTV system on the Russian Space Station Mir are considered public domain and may be freely distributed, without prior permission.

DOSVIDANIYA Miles WF1F