Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, or AMSAT, volunteers have established communications with RadFxSat-2, a small CubeSat that had been silent since it deployed in a Virgin Orbit launch 17th January 2021.

That day, the California-based company successfully deployed 10 CubeSats selected by NASA as part of the agency’s CubeSat Launch Initiative. Nine of them were designed, built and tested by universities across the United States. The RadFxSat-2 CubeSat was built by AMSAT with the science payload built at Vanderbilt by electrical engineering graduate students Rebekah Austin and James Trippe. Austin is now with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Trippe is with Sandia National Laboratories.

RadFxSat-2 is a joint mission partnership between Vanderbilt University and AMSAT and the fourth miniature satellite launched in the partnership to test radiation effects on space electronics. This project was supported in part by the Arnold Engineering Development Complex, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and Broadcom Corporation. The Vanderbilt-AMSAT missions run concurrently and provide experiment telemetry and amateur radio communications worldwide.

More Information - https://engineering.vanderbilt.edu/news/2021/vanderbilts-silent-cubesat-awakens-6-months-after-launch/