"Zulu Oscar, go ahead."

"Alpha Charlie Four Zulu Oscar."

"Alpha Charlie Four Zulu Oscar, this is November Four Bravo Quebec Whiskey, aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia."

That's pretty much all I remember of the QSO. At that point, the mouth went into QSO autopilot, and the brain went into shock.

It happened like this: It was Thursday, June 27, and the RTP ham group was meeting for lunch, as usual. Warren, AD4ZE, had alerted me the night before that a shuttle pass would occur beginning at 12:12p, just near the end of the lunch get-together. He thought we should all give it a try.

For a year or so, the hams here at Perimiter Park have been trying for a shuttle contact at every opportunity. Knowing that when on FM voice they use one downlink frequency, and five uplinks, we knew we only had a one in five chance of being on the right one. Our solution was always to get five hams to the parking lot, with one on each of the five uplink frequencies. We rarely heard the shuttle, and were never successful contacting them.

As lunch progressed, a comment or two was made about the upcoming pass, but there was no interest around the table, so at a few minutes after noon, Dick (KD4ISC), Warren, and myself got in the line to pay the bill. Gosh, that's a slow moving line. Finally, with the bill paying out of the way, the three of us headed for the parking lot. Warren picked a coupla uplinks, and I picked a few. Dick was riding with me, so he didn't get to pick any. I turned the radio on, and tuned one VFO to the downlink frequency of 145.55 Mhz. I set the other VFO to 144.91 with a step size of 20 Khz so I could easily switch between uplink freqs. There on 145.55 was a signal. An S3 signal... but not Columbia. After evaluating the situation for a few seconds, Dick determined that whatever was causing this signal would prevent us from hearing, so we'd better move. Sounded good to me, so we hit the road back to work. Along the way, I stepped through the uplink frequencies I had selected, calling for STS-78, Space Shuttle Columbia once or twice on each, and sure enough, there on 144.97 I was successful. A brief exchange of data and pleasantries, and Dick made a call to put himself in the log as well. The mood was quite festive the rest of the way back to work.

Dang! Not a single person in the hall all the way back to my office. "I really need to tell somebody about this. Who can I find? Bobbie! Yes, Bobbie needs to hear about this right away," I thought. Grabbing the phone, I poked up the number, and began rehearsing silently all the cute ways I could think of to break the news. Finally, there was an answer: "Hello, we can't come to the phone right now, but if you leave..."