April 13, 2026 - The audio level from NASA's ISS feed is very low. I've compensated somewhat with some gain settings, but it's still low.
Artemis II
The Artemis II mission has been the most popular event for this audio feed. The number of connections overloaded, and sometimes crashed processes, on the underpowered server. Some patches and updates were implemented to manage and improve connection resources. The NASA mission audio feed was generally great, until the splashdown. NASA lost audio on that feed during the hour before splashdown, and was switched to the comentary audio feed once it was noticed. More planning and resources are needed before another event like this one.
The *SPACE* Amateur Radio over Internet Protocol (RoIP) systems stream public audio transmissions from Mission Control and Astronauts for educational purposes. Connect via EchoLink to the *SPACE* conference, via IRLP to the 0100 experimental reflector or via Allstar to node 516221.
Transmissions primarily originate from NASA public media sources. The ISS public audio channel 2 feed is usually enabled, which is mostly english communications. ISS transmissions seem to occur mostly during early mornings USA time, since the ISS mostly operates on the UTC timezone. Astronaut activities are usually between 0700 UTC and 19:00 UTC. Other special events, such as launches or space walks, may also be included. Refer to www.nasa.gov/nasalive or www.spacex.com/launches/ for schedules.
- Expect long periods of silence. As noted, most ISS communications occur during early morning USA time. Also look for activity during special events scheduled by NASA, SpaceX and others.
- NASA and other audio sources are sometimes unavailable, unreliable, noisy or their content changes. That may result in audio being unavilable to this service periodcially.
- IRLP node owners must enable experimental node access by editing the custom/environment file to include the line:
export ALLOW_EXPERIMENTAL_NODES=YES
- No conferencing or communication is provided between connected nodes. Transmissions are automatically muted.
- Echolink connections utilize the GSM CODEC. IRLP and other connections default to the uncompressed or u-law CODEC, which "may" provide somewhat better audio fidelity or quality compared to EchoLink.
- Some musical tones may be included on NASA and other transmissions. We attempt to only use public mission control audio sources which minimizes music and media content.
- The transmissions are activated by a VOX interface. The system attempts to interrupt excessively long transmissions. However, some transmissions may exceed your transmit time out timer.
- Recordings of transmissions are published at space.rfnet.link/recordings/.
- This is what the ARRL references from the FCC and NASA about Can I re-transmit communications on the ham frequencies? Rules and guidelines may differ for other countries.
Support Contact: WD5M
theLinkbox statistics for EchoLink *SPACE* / IRLP 0100 connection since last restart:
Uptime: 6 days, 17 hours and 11 minutes
Tx packets: 133971457, 53858.16 Mbytes
Rx packets: 5179816, 2228.45 Mbytes
Connections: 15802
Users: 5 of 60 Max
Bandwidth Tx: 124 Kbps, Rx: 1 Kbps
Peak users: 125, 4/10 18:37
Peak Tx bandwidth: 1023 Kbps @ 4/10 18:59
Peak Rx bandwidth: 61 Kbps @ 4/10 18:59
Allstar 516221 statistics since last restart:
Keyups today.....................................: 615
Keyups since system initialization...............: 844
TX time today....................................: 01:14:23:139
TX time since system initialization..............: 01:32:57:777
Uptime...........................................: 57:51:23
Connections......................................: 6 of 25 Max
Linked...........................................: 9
Load average.....................................: 5.02 5.40 5.32
Allstar 516222 statistics since last restart:
Connections......................................: 6 of 25 Max
Linked...........................................: 9
Load average.....................................: 5.02 5.40 5.32
Allstar 516222 statistics since last restart:
Change Log
- April 11, 2026 - Stopped audio feed from WD5M-L and 516222.
- April 6, 2026 - Limited EchoLink / IRLP conference connections to 80 to avoid overloading conference.
- April 6, 2026 - Temporarily added Allstar node 516222 to reduce the load on node 516221.
- April 1, 2026 - Artemis II mission added.
- August 1, 2025 - I successfully tested another method to provide NASA mission control audio during the SpaceX crew launch to the space station this morning. This method must be setup manually for each mission, as NASA does not provide a common audio feed for launch missions and the space station.
- July 13, 2025 - Changed from disconnecting Allstar connections that transmit, to muting connections with the Asterisk MUTEAUDIO() function in the extensions.conf dialplan.
- June 27, 2025 - Changed audio feed to Allstar due to audio distortion bug in chan_tlb/chan_echolink.
- June 24, 2025 - Moved services to a new VPS running Debian 12, theLinkbox and ASL3.
- February 5, 2023 - NASA ISS Mission Control audio volume has been very low and noisy for several days. I have attempted to filter and compensate.
- September 1, 2022 - Initial release of space.rfnet.link
