Key members of the RARC space station contact team met with the faculty at Woodson Middle School in Hopewell where the ARISS contact will be made. It’s a thoroughly modern school with good facilities. The school is scheduled to have a contact between January and June 2022. The RARC team:
- Teaches and leads labs in “things radio” and communications in general. That includes such cutting edge technology like using two cans and a string.
- Teaches how to communicate in a net with considerable latency (earth-space-earth). We’ll unleash them with HTs to give them practice.
- If we can get it all working in time and the ARISS organization agrees, we will switch from using phone-patch to direct with antennas on the roof. A sub-group of three members are working on that.
Currently 8 hams and 3 school faculty members make up the team. A few of them are shown in the photo.
The self-appointed project manager for the RARC is W4BRU (w4bru@arrl.net).