Radio Contact with Soviet Space Station, MIR

Photos coutesy of

The brief contact was recorded on February 4, 1992 from Montreal, Canada.

A simple VHF 2M radio and discone antenna on 145.55 Mhz was used to establish contact with Alexandre Volkov, U4MIR, aboard the orbiting Russian Space Station, MIR.

The station circled the Earth every 90 minutes or so and at the time of this pass was about 400 km away from my station. Alexandre's setup consisted of a simple crystal-controlled handheld radio with about 1 Watt of power into a wire antenna stuck to a window of the spacecraft. I made several contacts with the MIR Space station including one from my car while driving down Highway 13 near Montreal using a 45W Kenwood TM721A dual-band mobile radio.

EPILOGUE: The space craft was decommissioned in 2000 and fell back to Earth over the South Pacific Ocean on March 23, 2001

For a complete history of MIR, visit the MIR on Wikipedia page.