Low cost APRS !!

I had no transmitter module, to test my new Arduino sketch except the low
cost JMR-TX1 module. For my surprise it works like a charm and succeeded
to transmit packet frames without missing any,  just like a robust FM transmitter
module !!! .
On spectrum analyzer I noticed a lot of noise, but a simple output filter can
boost using of this cheap  low power module for more lab and field experiments.

Educational Satellite Ground Station

My new book !!

Educational Satellite Ground Station
How to Assemble, Calibrate, Operate and Maintain, an educational satellite ground station.

Fox-1 ready for launch!

Fox-1 has passed all tests and is literally in the bag, ready for launch!

Source AMSAT-NA  FB page

Meet The Fox Project

 Just posted on the AMSAT Facebook and Twitter feed: Saturday afternoon challenge! Next 10 $100 donations to Fox-1C at https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/6pz92/ab/561Zd will be matched 100%!



Rosetta CometLanding

Rosetta #CometLanding webcast by European Space Agency Watch European Space Agency's Rosetta #CometLanding webcast on Livestream.com. Live webcast from ESA mission control, when Europe's Rosetta spacecraft dispatches the Philae lander to make the first-ever touchdown on a comet. Official hashtag: #CometLanding

4M Amateur Radio Payload received

The 4M amateur radio payload with a WSJT JT65B 145.980 MHz beacon was
launched on Thursday, October 23 at 1759 UT.
The Chang’e-5-T1 mission 4M payload launched on
the Chang Zheng CZ-3C/G2 rocket from the LC2 launch
complex at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, Sichuan.
The first telemetry from the JT65B beacon was received at 1918 UT in Brazil.
The spacecraft will head into a Lunar Transfer Orbit (LTO), before performing
a flyby around the Moon. Radio amateurs are encouraged to receive and report
the signals. http://moon.luxspace.lu/receiving-4m/
See the 4M payload Blog at http://moon.luxspace.lu/blog/
4M Lunar Payload
AMSAT-UK

The International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3)

The International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3) is a NASA spacecraft that was launched in 1978 to study Earth’s magnetosphere. It was repurposed and renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) in 1983 to study two comets and has been in a heliocentric orbit since then, traveling just slightly faster than Earth. It’s finally catching up with Earth from behind with the closest approach expected in August, 2014.

Since NASA no longer has the capability to receive and command the spacecraft a group of amateurs, with NASA’s permission, decided to do it for themselves.

On March 1-2, 2014 radio amateurs at the Bochum Amateur Radio Facility in Germany were able to detect the beacon signal from the spacecraft over a distance of 43 million km. After some changes to the ground equipment and aligning the receive antenna to the predicted position in the sky, the 2 GHz beacon signal could positively be identified due to its frequency, the position in the sky and the frequency shift due to the radial velocity (Doppler shift).

In June Dennis Wingo KD4ETA and other volunteers succeeded in commanding the spacecraft using the Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico.

Read more at Dennis Wingo KD4ETA blog http://denniswingo.wordpress.com/
Source AmsatUK

Space Buffs Make Contact With Discarded NASA Probe

 

A group of citizen scientists has commandeered a NASA spacecraft that was launched in 1978 and had gone unused since 1997.
Today the group made first contact with the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3) when the spacecraft acknowledged receiving a signal from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, says Keith Cowing, co-director of the ISEE-3 Reboot Project, a group of about 20 volunteer space buffs. “We knew we could do this—it’s a vindication,” he says. “It’s sort of like reaching back in time to grab something that otherwise would have been lost.”

Cowing says that the group is now getting telemetry data from the spacecraft. Over the coming days, they will try to understand the health of the spacecraft and its 13 scientific instruments. The spacecraft was launched to study space weather and is due to make a close pass around the moon.
Next month, they plan to instigate a burn with the remaining fuel and move the spacecraft into a new orbit. Also in June, they plan to start communicating with ISEE-3 from a second radio telescope, a 21-meter dish at Morehead State University in Kentucky. This dish is more movable than the massive Arecibo telescope and can better track the spacecraft as it gets closer to Earth, Cowing says.
The ISEE-3 Reboot Project raised more than $150,000 in crowd-funding to support its volunteer efforts.

Posted in Space

37 satellites on June 19 Yasny Dnepr launch

 37 satellites on June 19 Yasny Dnepr launch !!

Deimos 2
Deimos 2 is a small Earth observation satellite, which will carry a 75-centimeter-resolution imager provided by Satrec Initiative of South Korea.

KazEOSat 2 (DZZ-MR)
KazEOSat 2 from the Republic of Kazakhstan is utilizing the latest Earth Observation (EO) satellite technologies from EADS Astrium and its subsidiary SSTL to create a national system.

SkySat 3
SkySat-3 to 15 are commercial Earth observation satellites by Skybox Imaging.

TabletSat-Aurora
The Russian start-up company SPUTNIX designed and built the TabletSat-Aurora technology demonstrator and earth observing satellite.

BugSat 1 (Tita)
BugSat 1 is the first technology demonstration mission for a platform of small earth observation satellites designed by the Argentinan company Satellogic S.A.

SaudiSat 4
SaudiSat 4 is a Saudi-Arabian technology demonstration satellite developed by the KACST .

Hodoyoshi 3
Hodoyoshi 3 is an experimental earth-observing micro-satellite built by the University of Tokyo. It has a 40 m ground resolution.

Hodoyoshi 4
Hodoyoshi 4 is an experimental earth-observing micro-satellite built by the University of Tokyo. It has a 5 m ground resolution.

AprizeSat 9
AprizeSat 10
LatinSat, later renamed AprizeSat, is a constellation of small Low-Earth-Orbit satellites (64 satellites planned) to achieve a global communication system of data transmission and fixed and mobile asset tracking and monitoring (GMPCS). The satellites also carry experimental payloads.

UniSat 6
 is the sixth satellite designed and manufactured by GAUSS group.

BRITE-CA 1 (CanX 3E)
BRITE-CA 2 (CanX 3F)
CanX-3 (Canadian Advanced Nanospace eXperiments), also known as BRITE (BRIght-star Target Explorer), is a mission planned to make photometric observations of some of the brightest starts in the sky

Perseus-M 1
Perseus-M 2
The Perseus-M satellites are small maritime surveillance satellites developed by Canopus Systems.

Flock-1c 1
Flock-1c 2
Flock-1c 3
Flock-1c 4
Flock-1c 5
Flock-1c 6
Flock-1c 7
Flock-1c 8
Flock-1c 9
Flock-1c 10
Flock-1c 11
The Flock earth observing constellation built and operated by Planet Labs (formerly Cosmogia Inc.) consists of 28 triple CubeSats.

POPSAT-HIP 1
POPSAT-HIP 1 is a triple cubesat built by Microspace Rapid Pte Ltd., Singapore. The spacecraft is to demonstrate the functionality of a high resolution optical payload and attitude control propulsion system on a Cubesat Class Nano-satellite.

Tigrisat

TIGRISat is an Iraqi 3U CubeSat built by Iraqi students at the La Sapienza University of Rome with a mission to detect dust storms over Iraq.

Lemur 1
Lemur-1 is a low-Earth orbiting satellite, built by NanoSatisfi Inc.
Lemur-1 will be deployed from the Italian UniSat 6,

QB50P1
QB50P2
QB50P1 is one of two precursor satellites for the QB50 project, which will demonstrate the possibility of launching a network of 50 CubeSats built by Universities Teams all over the world as a primary payload on a low-cost launch vehicle to perform first-class science in the largely unexplored lower thermosphere.

PACE
PACE (Platform for Attitude Control Experiments) is a cubesat project of the National Cheng Kung University of the Republic of China (Taiwan).

ANTELSAT
ANTELSAT is a 2U CubeSat class satellite, which has been developed by the Uruguayan Facultad de Ingeniería de la Universidad de la República (FING), the State Faculty of Engineering, and the national telecom service provider ANTEL. It is the first Uruguayan satellite .

AeroCube 6
The AeroCube 6 cubesat is a 1 kg nanosatellite for technical research.It is built and operated by the Aerospace Corporation.

Duchifat 1
Duchifat-1 is an experimental and educational spacecraft developed and built by students of secondary schools at the Space Laboratory of the Herzliya Science Centre (HSC). It is built to the 1U CubeSat standard.

NanoSatC-Br 1
NanoSatC-Br 1 is the first CubeSat project of Brazil, developed at the Southern Regional Space Research Center  in collaboration with the Space Science Laboratory of the Federal University of Santa Maria .

PolyITAN 1
PolyITAN-1 is a CubeSat designed and built by the National Technical University of Ukraine – KPI in cooperation with the Ukrainian HAM radio community. The mission is to launch Ukrainian educational satellite build by KPI students and space exploration enthusiasts.

Source  space.skyrocket./ AMSAT FB

Amateur Radio-Developed Software Assisting in Search for Missing Flight MH370

04/07/2014

 

US Navy personnel helping to look for missing Malaysia Air Flight MH370 are using the signal-processing and analysis package Spectrum Laboratory by Wolf Buescher, DL4YHF, to analyze recently detected 37.5 kHz “pings” that may be from the missing plane’s “black box.” Some Spectrum Laboratory screen shots as seen aboard the Australian Defense Vessel Ocean Shield were shown on TV. The US Navy personnel are guests aboard the Australian ship. VLF experimenter Warren Ziegler, K2ORS, said the software is the same package Amateur Radio experimenters used recently to detect transatlantic signals on 29 kHz.

“Wolf’s package is very first-rate software, and I know that there have been other professional uses, but this was quite an interesting one!” Ziegler said.

The software began as a simple DOS-based FFT program, but it is now a specialized audio analyzer, filter, frequency converter, hum filter, data logger and more, and it is available for download from DL4YHF’s Amateur Radio Software site.

Buescher said he was skeptical about the initial “ping” detection by one of the search vessels, but now, he says, “the spectrogram taken by the US team aboard Ocean Shield is convincing.” He said a screenshot from Australian TV clearly shows the “bip-bip-bip” ultrasonic bursts or pings, “just as they should look,” rather than a “just a wobbly carrier that comes and goes.”

“In slow-CW terms, it would be an ‘outstanding signal.’” Buescher said. “Now keeping fingers crossed that the [“black box”] batteries last a bit longer than specified. The experts say the pinger’s battery usually degrades slowly, instead of going QRT abruptly.”

Source ARRL

Sentinel-1 soundtrack

Published on Apr 3, 2014
          

Sentinel-1A, the first satellite for Europe's environmental monitoring Copernicus programme, is being launched from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana on 3 April 2014. It will be lofted into orbit on a Soyuz rocket.

This animation shows some of the critical stages delivering Sentinel-1 into orbit around Earth. After separating from the Fregat upper stage, the satellite takes around 10 hours to deploy its 12 m-long radar and two 10 m-long solar wings. This deployment sequence is unique, choreographed to ensure that both deploy in the safest possible way. This approach also allows power from the wings to be available as soon as possible so that the satellite is independent.

Delivering vital information for numerous operational services, from monitoring ice in the polar oceans to tracking land subsidence, Sentinel-1 will play a key role in the largest civil Earth-observation programme ever conceived.

The animation is set to a track called Sentinel by Mike Oldfield, a world-renowned musician and big space fan.

Credits:
Graphics: ESA/ATG medialab; Music written by M. Oldfield/copyright EMI Virgin