Satellite Sounds

Back in 2010 I found some old audio cassettes on which I had recorded some of the sounds I heard from the satellites.

Rather than discarding the tapes I decided to digitize them and make them available to interested hams.

Below are sound bites from:

  • RS-5
  • RS-7
  • Oscar 9
  • Oscar 10
  • Oscar 11

I also found a few minutes with the voice of Owen Garriot, W5LFL, from his pioneering trip on STS-9 in Nov/Dec 1983.

All my available data is presented here. The tapes were labeled with the name of the satellite and the data of the recording – no orbit numbers, very few times, no antenna or radio data.

If anybody has – or can detect – further information I will be more than happy to add it to the data presented here.

When Owen Garriot, W5LFL, made his pioneering trip in the Columbia space shuttle, I arranged it so I could operate my radio when he was active. From memory I recall that the procedure was that the ground stations called for one minute on the even minutes and then listened for W5LFL to transmit during the odd minutes. His transmissions were – to the best of my memory – to repeat the call signs he had heard during the previous period. The frequency was 145.550 MHz (I got this from the tape ;-)).

I had set my equipment up so that I could record the downlink in the left channel of the tape recorder and the uplink (my voice) on the right channel. I made three recordings, but only the first (orbit 97, 15:20 – 15:28 UTC) has anything with W5LFL’s voice in it, so it is the one I present here:

The recordings are in ogg-format but interested persons can get a wave (.wav) file on request.

These and many other satellite sound can also be found on Matthias Bopp, DD1US’s excellent page: Sounds from Space

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