Vanderbilt’s Silent CubeSat Awakens 6 months after Launch

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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.

“It’s alive after all. After six months of hard work, our AMSAT partners were able to establish communication with the satellite, which had been unresponsive since the launch.”
— Brian Sierawski, a research associate professor of electrical engineering and a member of Vanderbilt’s Institute for Space and Defense Electronics

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/

Hyderabad Hams Develop Low Cost Transverter for QO-100 Satellite

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Hyderabad Hams Develop Low Cost Transverter for QO-100 Satellite

Radio amateurs in Hyderabad have developed low-cost equipment to communicate via the geostationary satellite QO-100 amateur transponder

A group of Radio Amateurs in the city are literally making waves after they succeeded in indigenously designing and testing low-cost equipment that could help the Hams communicate via QO-100 geo-synchronous satellite.

In what is certain to be a game changer for the radio amateur community, five Hyderabad-based Ham operators have made prototypes of down and up converters for the QO-100 satellite. Use of this equipment, would enable any Ham operator in practicing satellite communication, which hitherto would have forced them to invest heavy amounts.

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SSTV Sked from ISS

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Russian cosmonauts on the International Space Station (ISS) are planning to transmit slow-scan TV (SSTV) images on 145.800MHz FM using the SSTV mode PD-120.

The transmissions will be made from RS0ISS in the Russian ISS service module.

The dates are planned as the 6 August 2021 from 1050 to 1910UTC, and the 7 August 2021 from 0950 to 1555UTC.

As always, these dates and times could change depending on operations onboard the ISS.

The signal should be receivable on a handheld with a quarter-wave whip.

If your rig has selectable FM filters, try the wider filter for 25kHz channel spacing.

ISS Pass Times - http://amsat.org/track