“Space Sailors” Seeking Download Help from Ham Radio Operators

A group of students at Cornell University is seeking participation from radio amateurs who are equipped with satellite stations for help in listening for signals from a retroreflective laser sail that is scheduled to be deployed later this week. The sail is currently attached to a 1U CubeSat that was launched early Tuesday 2nd December 2025, from the International Space Station, but will separate and become its own free-flying spacecraft equipped with four tiny “ChipSat” flight computers that will transmit telemetry data back to Earth.

This is the first flight of their ChipSats, and it is this data that the students seek help detecting, according to Ph.D. candidate Joshua Umansky-Castro, who has an amateur radio license, call sign KD2WTQ. The light sail’s ChipSats will be transmitting data using the LoRa® digital protocol on 437.400 MHz. The sail, stowed within the CubeSat, is expected be released a couple of days after deployment — tentatively this Thursday 4th December 2025 — and will likely function independently for no more than 48 hours due to the drag created by the sail.

Additional information, including LoRa parameters and links to a list of compatible receivers and the decoder file, may be found at alphacubesat.cornell.edu in the ChipSat Ground Station Guide (docx).

It is hoped that the ChipSat and light sail will become the trailblazer for future missions around the solar system, and one day to our closest stellar neighbour, Alpha Centauri.

ARISS Video Promotes School Contacts Through ISS and Amateur Radio

ARISS has released a new video promoting amateur radio on the International Space Station (ISS). Produced by NASA, the video features astronaut Nichole Ayers (KJ5GWI) aboard the ISS explaining how amateur radio plays a part in school contacts with astronauts on the ISS. Ayers explains many of the procedures and technical challenges that amateur radio operators must address during a school contact.

“It’s a true privilege for me to be able to inspire the new generation of scientists and engineers through amateur radio.”

— Astronaut Nichole Ayers (KJ5GWI)

ARISS is asking for donations as part of its Giving Tuesday campaign. Those interested in donating to ARISS can do so here - https://www.ariss.org/

Indian Amateurs Help a Woman Lost in Bangladesh

A ham radio club in West Bengal, India, best known for its special skill in helping reunite family members who are lost - sometimes for years - has once again made use of its robust network on behalf of a woman who’d gone missing two decades ago. 

An older woman, believed to have been begging on the streets of Bangladesh for survival for years, has reconnected with her family in India through the efforts of the West Bengal Radio Club, an organisation with a speciality in missing-persons cases. 

The woman’s disappearance was traced to a religious pilgrimage she made nearly 20 years ago - an annual gathering near the Ganges River. With the volume of pilgrims at the event, known as the Gangasagar Mela, it is not uncommon for many attendees to get lost or to go missing. According to the club’s secretary, Ambarish Nag Biswas, VU2JFA, the woman, who is now about 70 years of age and from a village in India, somehow joined a group of pilgrims from Bangladesh. That is how she is believed to have taken a detour to Bangladesh instead of returning home.

News accounts said that she was soon living on the street, begging. Recently, ham radio contacts in Bangladesh reached out to the West Bengal hams, asking them to intervene after they questioned her and she uttered one of the few words she could: “Sagar,” the name of the district she came from in India. Using photographs of her and their wide network of contacts, the West Bengal hams finally reached her surviving family members, according to a report in the Australia India News. She has two surviving sons in Delhi. Her husband and one son have since died. Attempts at uniting her with her sons were underway as Newsline went to production.