[mrspeaker]

The other day there was an article here about "The ISS repeater on 437.8 Mhz". In the comments someone linked to an ISS tracker... I clicked it, and it said there was a pass near my house in 20 minutes, so I dug up my cheap-o RTL-SDR dongle and stuck the tiny aerial out on my fire escape.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I actually saw a signal pop up as it passed: https://imgur.com/a/jCOaFSk. It's apparently closer tonight, so I'm going up on my roof to see if I can get audio!

[mindcrime]

I was the guy who posted the "ISS repeater on 437.8 Mhz" article. Likewise, I was surprised that I managed to catch a minute or so of audio from the repeater using my handheld Baofeng BF-F8HP. I wasn't even really expecting it.. I'd had the radio out earlier in the day when I was programming the new repeater info in with Chirp, then I stuck it back on the charger and left it... unintentionally leaving it both "on" and on that channel. A few hours later I was in the other room and heard noise from the room where the radio was charging and jumped up and ran in there, and realized I was hearing people talking on the ISS repeater.

I grabbed the radio and ran outside to try and get a contact on the repeater myself, but no luck. :-(

Still, just hearing it was kinda cool in its own right.

Edit: as luck would have it, the ISS just passed over about 5 minutes ago. I went outside ahead of time to wait for it, and I caught a bit of audio, but wasn't able to make any contact myself. I think I waited a little to long to try, out of fear of walking on somebody else (per the earlier discussion, I don't have a radio with cross-band full duplex capability). Oh well... live and learn. And I'll buy a better radio at some point.