I’ve been fiddling recently with trying to receive satellites but without all the going outside and waving yagi antennas around… I’ve heard a few QSOs on DIWATA 2 and there is a very good pass in a day or so where I may be able to get a call in. This is using the Trio TR-9130 as receiver as it has a horizontal dipole connected, and the FTM100DE as transmitter, though so far without success on transmit.

Anyway, I remembered the FTM100 has APRS built in and the ISS often sends and receives this in 145.825 and so I’ve been leaving the radio switched on. Today I noticed it did indeed receive packets from the ISS.

I also downloaded UISS by ON6MU which seems to ‘just work’ – nice that, I downloaded it and ran it and it found the sound card and returned an APRS message on a later ISS pass. Oddly, the FTM100D did not decode that message (the squelch is set to 0). It comes with a module called SoundModem by UZ7HO which seems pretty comprehensive. Another package to play with…