To: All RADIO AMATEURS
From: Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation
712 H Street NE, Suite 1653
Washington, DC 20002
DATE: 2023 Oct 09
ARISS SSTV Event Reported in Error
The announcement in yesterday’s AMSAT News Service bulletins concerning an upcoming Slow-Scan Television (SSTV) event transmitted from the International Space Station (ISS) was incorrect.
This SSTV activity is a verification test with new hardware uploaded to ISS. This activity was never meant to be an operational SSTV event as some sources have speculated. ARISS International encouraged informing the ham community of the test and encouraged amateurs to post to the SSTV Gallery at Welcome to the ARISS SSTV gallery, only so that the verification test can be fully evaluated.
Official ARISS participation certificates will not be issued for this activity, because it is only a verification test. It should be noted that third-party certificates mentioned in the ANS article are not official ARISS awards.
Further, the Oct. 16-20 dates, described in the ANS article for the SSTV test are not correct because specific dates for this test have not yet been selected or placed in the ISS crew schedule. The ARISS team is working to fit the SSTV event in the crew schedule. Separate U.S. and Russian EVAs to be performed in October will necessitate suspension of amateur radio activity, as always. Further, ARISS school contacts planned in that time period, as well as the normal science investigations that are part of the crew schedule, make it difficult to establish a definite timeline in advance.
The Service Module radio system will be down until the SSTV verification test is completed. That means that the 145.825 MHz packet digipeater from the Service Module radio is off for now.
The SSTV system in the Service Module will again attempt to verify a replacement piece of hardware during the period of Oct 27 until Nov 01. The system will be off around the required period of no transmissions during the planned EVA on Oct 31. Images will be transmitted on 145.800 MHz and in the typical PD120 format. Images can be posted to the Gallery.
Since this is a test of replacement components of the system, there still may be unexpected outages or issues.
The transmitter is activated in DB and ready for scheduling in Network.