The Dwingeloo Radio-telescope dish will be placed back on the Tower next week.
Peter Bennema (ASTRON – restoration project leader Dwingeloo Radio-telescope) posted the following message on twitter:
“Exciting: Monday, November 19 11:00 the dish of the Dwingeloo radio-telescope will be placed back on the tower.”
Homepage and other references:
Camras website (PI9CAM)
FITSAT-1 led experiment on Christmas Eve.
The led experiment comprising a bank of high power LEDs that will be driven with 200W pulses to produce extremely bright flashes that may be visible to the unaided eye of observers on Earth.
The team aim to start testing the LEDs at the end of November and it is planned that a message will be flashed from space on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2012. Further information will be posted at http://www.fit.ac.jp/~tanaka/fitsat.shtml
[PE0SAT Thanks Amsat-UK for the above information]
AmsatZL KiwiSAT
This looks promising, linear transponder, FM, 2 meter, 70 centimetre and 23 centimetre all in one small satellite made by AmsatZL. Accepted launch, may 2013.
FUNcube Dongle Pro+ Arrived
Yesterday I received the new FUNCube in the mail, It all looks very neat and Howard has left nothing to chance to deliver the SDR receiver in the right way. It is shipped in a professional manner, better than many companies.
In the evening I finally had some time to test this FUNcube, it turned out that during the test there were tropo conditions and that explained why there were so many stations visible on the 192 khz bandwidth in the 2 metre band.
I did a quick scan of the AIR, 2m and 70cm band and it is immediately apparent that we are dealing with a better SDR receiver than the first version. In the next couple of days I will spend more time with the FUNCube and add some experiences to this blog.
One thing though was amazing, I could received FO-29 beacon and the whole transponder passband on a vertical antenna, this had not worked previously.
Specifications:
My current SDR setup, FUNcube dongle pro+, Diamond X5000 vertical, SDRSharp development version, high quality 2.5m USB cable and Windows 7 64bit.
Homepage and other references:
FUNcube dongle Pro+ website.
SDRSharp software.
The last prism mission is now active. This is specially for Ham radio operators. PRISM’s downlink has been received among amateur radio operators since the launch of PRISM. This HAM Radio Service allows amateur radio operators to uplink messages to PRISM as well as downlink messages from PRISM. In other words, amateur radio operators can use PRISM as a message box.
In this HAM Radio Service, you can write messages onto PRISM’s on-board memory via FM packets uplink. Also you can command PRISM to downlink the stored messages in FM packets. Thus, PRISM can be used as a kind of message box. Also, you can evaluate FM packets performance of your ground station designed for amateur radio satellites.
The followings are three commands you can use:
Homepage and other references:
Prism Ham service website.
Problems with AO-27 (Eyesat)
On Oct 5, 2012 AO-27 went off-line and the ground station team is trying to recover the Satellite. The attempt failed and at the moment the ground crew is in the middle of a new attempt to get AO-27 operational again. All the information can be found on the AO-27 website. The last news from Oct, 18th gives us the following information:
We tried to do a restart of the high level code today which did not work out. We left the transmitter on to drain the batteries in hopes of clearing any latch ups. On the next pass, we could turn the bird back on so it survived the battery draining. The modem problem was back and we got that cleared. Its back up on the secondary bootloader.
[PE0SAT Thanks N3UC for the above information]
Homepage and other references:
AO-27 website.