ISS astronaut contacted by Gloucestershire radio ham in garden shed

Radio ham Adrian Lane was able to send his "73" (ham lingo for "best regards") to an American astronaut as the International Space Station passed over Gloucestershire.
The amateur operator told The Telegraph of his communication with the International Space Station from his garden shed in the small market town of Coleford.
Lane will have spoken to either Scott Kelly [PDF], or Kjell Lindgren [PDF], who are the only Americans currently aboard the ISS as part of Expedition 44.
Lane, 52, reportedly spent weeks preparing to contact the ISS after he was informed that the station would be passing over his home. The former lorry driver plotted the approximate path of the ISS using Michael Lodge-Paolini's ISSTracker.
He established a four-minute window during which the station would be contactable as it orbited the planet at 18,500mph, or 0.2759 per cent of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum.
Lane waited to broadcast his call-sign as the space farmers passed 200 miles overhead. Then, "to his astonishment, an American astronaut answered back to 'welcome him aboard'".
The pair managed to communicate for roughly 50 seconds before losing contact.
Father-of-two Lane told The Telegraph that "it was a mundane conversation" which still "blew his mind", despite Lane asking what it was like in space and receiving the laconic reply: "Very dark."
"I said to them how wonderful Earth must look from up there. They said 'Oh Adrian, it's amazing, you can't imagine what it looks like from up here'," Lane gushed.
"He said it was very dark, but when you look down at Earth it is full of colour. I basically asked who he was and how things were in space that day. It was such a rush. I was buzzing. It's not every day you get to talk to some guy out in space," said Lane.
Expedition 44 [PDF] will feature the first humans to harvest and eat crops grown off-world, which NASA describes as "another necessary advance for astronauts travelling on deep space missions".

Astronauts will be allowed to eat half of the second crop of lettuce in the Veggie investigation, freezing the other half for a return to Earth, where scientists will analyse the plants and compare them to a control set grown at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

During downtime on weekends, ISS crew members have been known to make unscheduled amateur radio contacts with us Earth-dwelling apes, as we dribble our meager terrestrial comestibles down our fronts.
The Telegraph reports that Lane "spends most of his time using permitted frequencies to talk to fellow enthusiasts around the world", much to the chagrin of his wife, Deilwen.
"She hates it with a passion," he said. "We've had so many rows over it. Even the kids know where to find me. Where's Dad? Oh, he's in the shed again."
Ten British schools have been shortlisted to make contact with Her Majesty's astronaut Tim Peake, again using amateur radio, after he boards the station on 15 December for Expeditions 46 and 47

Rogue US Navy satellite causing QRM across Europe

A satellite launched by the US military has gone rogue and is causing interference to radio hams across Europe.
The US Navy’s PCSat NO-44, which is only supposed to transmit over the US, is now drowning out European amateurs and the USN doesn’t know what to do about it.
Licensed as an amateur satellite in the Amateur Satellite Service, PCSat was launched 30 September 2001 from the Kodiak Launch Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska aboard Athena I.
It was designed to be a worldwide position, status reporting and message communications satellite for remote travellers. The satellite is on a tight polar orbit and passes over Europe every hour or so.
It uses the APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System) protocol to permit hundreds of users per pass to access the satellite. To demonstrate this concept, PCSat augments the existing worldwide terrestrial amateur radio APRS tracking system by providing links from the 90 per cent of the Earth's surface not covered by the terrestrial network, so when it passes over it drowns out other users of the frequency.
The spectrum it interferes with is around 150MHz, and generally used by radio amateurs for meteor scatter, sending short text messages over distances of up to 2,000km by bouncing them off the ionisation caused when a meteorite breaks up in the atmosphere. The last thing a radio ham wants is to wait for a meteor shower to send a message and then have it drowned out by a passing satellite.
Now redundant, PCSat NO-44 should be dead, but isn't. This is because it is designed to use more power than it has on board – a negative power budget – and then reboot when its solar cells generate enough power to wake it up. Robert Bruninga of the US Naval Academy, posted to a Usenet group to explain the problem:
PCSAT (now 14 years old) had a backup fail-safe beacon on 144.39 [MHz] that would activate after any unknown spacecraft reset to give us a backup comm link in case the primary 145.825 channel died.
Being on the North American APRS frequency with hundreds of IGates there would always be at least one that would hear this "emergency call home" from PCSAT even though the channel is generally saturated. And it worked.
The problem is, that now PCSAT resets on every orbit due to negative power budget and so, on every orbit that beacon comes back on. Even if we did get a command up to reset it, that setting would last only 15 minutes to the next eclipse.
We learned our lesson! That was our FIRST amateur satellite and we sure learned NOT to use a "connected-packet-command link" that needs ACKS and Retries and logon passwords just to LOGON before you can even send a SHUTUP command.
All our satellites since operate without the multiple Send, Connect, ACK, retry, ACK, Command, ACK overhead ... just to get one command understood. Now, only the receiver on the spacecraft has to be functional to command it to silence in a single packet. But too late for PCSAT.
We are sorry that we have no good answers. But we hope we can mitigate this instance of "friendly fire" collateral damage so that we don't cause an overall black-eye to amateur radio overall friendly operations?
An extra-terrestrial radio source is outside Ofcom’s jurisdiction, but the US Navy may be in breach of International Telecommunications Union regulations, which stipulate that radio transmitters remain under control.
In time, the solar cells will stop holding enough charge, and the orbit of NO-44 will decay, with the satellite burning up, but this is many years, perhaps decades away. Until then, the frequency remains very difficult to use.