International Radio Amateurs' Organization

These words will echo from space in the near future, inspiring students, exciting ham radio operators and touching the world.

If all goes as planned, a unique Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA)—or Spacewalk will be conducted on the International Space Station (ISS) in early February 2006.

During this spacewalk, the ISS crew will push
a Russian spacesuit overboard - with no humans in it, of course!

But this Spacesuit holds the hopes, dreams and creativity of students around the world. And for a week or two, this Suit-robotsatellite will take on a life of its own - parroting students voices from around the world, voicing down suit health telemetry and sending a special commemorative picture to all who want to receive it.

Suitsat-1 (also called Radioskaf or Radio Sputnik in Russian) mission activities will be conducted on the amateur radio (ham radio) frequencies, a bit above the FM broadcast band. The voice signals can be picked up with ham radio receivers and FM VHF (Very High Frequency) scanner, like police-band scanners, tuned to 145.990 (ISS relay on 437.800).

Students, scouts, teachers, ham radio operators, and the general public are encouraged to track the space suit, hear the conversations from space, copy the suit telemetry and capture the picture. A special certificate will be distributed to those who receive the voice signals and those who capture the picture. We also will have a special award for those students who receive the "special words" that are embedded in the messages from our SuitSat student "crew members." These special words are in different languages - English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese. So you are encouraged to record the SuitSat downlink audio and get help from fellow students who know these languages.

Also included in this spacesuit is a computer Compact Disk (CD) with images of over 300 items collected from schools and educational organizations around the world. These include creative works of art from students as well as student signatures, school or scout logos, and class or group pictures.

Students, schools and educational organizations that participated in the development of this disk earlier this year will all be part of the SuitSat spacewalk - as their creative works, signatures and pictures all float in space!

Other information soon available.

73 DE VU2LOC
Shailesh Deshmukh