Category Archives: Amateur Satellite

Bouncing APRS packets off the ISS…

My wife mentioned to me that there was a visual pass of the ISS this evening. Wow, is she awesome or what? She found out about it by subscribing to the twitter feed “twisst”, which is apparently automated, and will send you messages when a ISS pass is about to occur. This pass had a maximum altitude of about 35 degrees, so I decided to get out my TH-D7A radio and my Arrow antenna and see if I could not only see it visually, but could bounce some packets off it. While waving my antenna around, I heard the telltale sound of a digital packet, and then, suddenly rising above the hill behind my house, there it was, looking nice and bright. I got my wife to look at it, and while I was looking down at my radio, it apparently went into eclipse, because when I looked back up, not a trace of it could be seen. Nevertheless, I bounced three packets off it, which were logged onto the Internet by gateways. Check it!

2009-09-23 03:47:51 UTC: K6HX-1>37UXPW,RS0ISS-3*,qAS,W6MSU-4:'2+9l <0x1c>-/>THD7A,5w,arrow
2009-09-23 03:48:52 UTC: K6HX-1>37UXPW,RS0ISS-3*,qAo,N6VIG:'2+9l <0x1c>-/>THD7A,5w,arrow
2009-09-23 03:50:51 UTC: K6HX-1>37UXPW,RS0ISS-3*,qAR,N0AN:'2+9l <0x1c>-/>THD7A,5w,arrow

via Raw packets of K6HX-1

Upcoming launch of SumbandilaSat

It looks like the launch of the South African amateur satellite is on track!

The launch of SumbandilaSat is on track for 15 September 2009. In an interview with SA AMSAT, Johan Erasmus, SunSpace systems engineer speaking from Baikonur, said that the satellite travelled well and that all system performed to specification during the testing phase. Tests were carried out in the clean room at the Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan. “All payloads operated well and we were able to test the amateur payload from a little distance away. The parrot, voice repeater and the voice beacon responded well.

Via AMSAT South Africa Homepage

As soon as we get a confirmed launch, I’ll try to get some audio and/or work the bird. Stay tuned!

Addendum: The launch didn’t go off today. From AMSAT-SA’s website.

Due to high winds at the launch site and some telemetry issues on the rocket the launch has been delayed for 24 hours and will now take place on 16 September at around 15:45 UTC.

That’s about 9 hours from now. Fingers crossed.

SumbandilaSat launch scheduled for Sept 15

I haven’t been playing with the LEO sats much lately, but it’s good to hear that the South African amateur satellite SumbandilaSat is nearing launch. It has a 2m/70cm FM transponder, and a voice beacon. I’ll try to get more information as the launch date gets closer.

SumbandilaSat launch scheduled for Sept 15

No luck on ISS SSTV, but NOAA 17 looks nice

I tried to record the pass of the ISS as it came over, but I heard nary a peep (or beep) from it as it went over. Annoyed, I did a quick search, and found that the NOAA 17 satellite was just coming up. I retuned and hand tracked that, yielding the following rather nice image:

A Personal Satellite Kit?

Planet Earth has entered the age of the Personal Satellite with the introduction of Interorbital’s TubeSat Personal Satellite (PS) Kit. The new IOS TubeSat PS Kit is the low-cost alternative to the CubeSat. It has three-quarters of the mass (0.75-kg) and volume of a CubeSat, but still offers plenty of room for most experiments or functions.

The interesting bit? Total cost = $8000, including launch costs. You can use paypal to order one and get a launch slot.

The not so interesting bit? It doesn’t appear that the launch vehicle actually exists.

Via Interorbital Systems – TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit | International Space Fellowship.

SSTV from the ISS, August 3 and 4

The ISS should be operating SSTV on August 3 and 4, using the Robot36 mode. I’ll go ahead and see if I can catch some pictures from space that way. Should work well, after my success with AO-51.

SSTV Aug 3 & 4 | ISS Fan Club.

Addendum: If you want to test your SSTV software before hand, you might want to use a recording that I made. Go here and fetch the linked .wav recording, and use it to test your SSTV software. It will also help you know what an SSTV signal sounds like.

Downloadable Book on High Altitude Amateur Balloon Launches

Big big thanks to Bill Meara of the Soldersmoke blog for calling my attention to the following link. Even bigger thanks to author Paul Verhage, for putting together this huge collection of useful information about balloon launches. My own high altitude balloon launch ideas have stalled a bit, but this book is excellent inspiration.

Near Space Exploration with the BASIC Stamp by Paul Verhage

NOAA Satellite Frequencies

I haven’t been goofing around much with receiving APT weather satellite data, but I was going to try to record some passes now that the days are longer and we get more daylight passes over North America. But I hadn’t programmed the frequencies into my radio, and was forced to look them up. So, here they are, all in one place, for future reference:

Satellite	Frequency
NOAA 15	137.500 Mhz
NOAA 17	137.620 Mhz
NOAA 18	137.100 Mhz
NOAA 19	137.9125 Mhz

X Prize? How about the N-Prize?

The Official Site for the N-Prize

The N-Prize offers two cash Prizes, each of £9,999.99 (nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds and ninety-nine pence, sterling).

The prizes will be awarded to the first persons or groups to put into orbit around the Earth a satellite with a mass of between 9.99 and 19.99 grams, and to prove that it has completed at least 9 orbits.

One prize (the “single-spend-to-orbit”, or “SSO” Prize) will be awarded to the first entrant to complete the challenge using a non-reusable launch system. The other prize (the “reusable vehicle” or “RV” Prize) will be awarded to the first entrant to complete the challenge using a partially or wholly reusable launch system. Both prizes carry equal status.

The cost of the launch, but not ground facilities, must fall within a budget of £999.99. Entrants for the RV Prize may exceed this budget, but must demonstrate recovery of hardware such that the per-launch cost remains within £999.99.

Imaginative use of string and chewing gum is encouraged. Entrants are responsible for everything, organisers are responsible for nothing.

Earlier, I blogged about the collision between Iridium 33 and the defunct COSMOS 2251 satellite. Today, I noticed that Celestrak had orbital elements for 134 fragments resulting from the collision. I was curious what the resulting pattern would look like, so I wrote a bit of code to suck them all in and plot them on a map. Here’s what I got for a particular moment around noon local time.

The labeled points are the tracked location of the main body of the satellite. There are orbital elements for 48 additional fragments of Iridium, and 84 additional fragments of COSMOS. The main body of Iridium 33 was at 785km altitude, while Cosmos is down around 771km. Debris is scattered over quite a wide variety of altitudes, from a low of 284km to a high of 1158km.

Today’s NOAA-19 pass….

Nice pass today over the middle of the U.S. Got it recorded and transferred, and my wife even took some pictures and a short video of me doing it. I’ll link that in later, but for now, check out the weather!

Addendum: Here’s me, recording the very audio that you see turned into a picture above. The high pitched whine you hear is actually the signal from the satellite, not a defect in the recording itself.

WA5DJJ Beacon Transmitter

Bill Meara over at Soldersmoke pointed me over to the webpage detailing the QRSS transmitter of David, WA5DJJ this morning. Check it out, it’s very inspiring. As it would happen, I’m currently receiving his FSK signal here in CM87ux:

Currently my rendering software is saving JPG files at 1 pixel per second. This makes it a bit hard to discern these QRSS3 signals. I’m thinking of making them twice as wide, and doing two pixels per second output.

Addendum. After a couple of hours, it looks like WA5DJJ is fading away. I can see bits of NM5DV coming and going here…

IRIDIUM 33 + COSMOS 2251 = BOOM

It was reported that an Iridium satellite and an “non-functional Russian satellite” collided yesterday. I was curious, so I did a bit of digging, and found out that NASA had reported that it was Iridium 33 and COSMOS-2251. A bit more work uncovered orbital elements for both objects, so I was able to plug in their numbers and determine the location of the collision. A bit more of scripting, and I had GMT generate the following map (click to zoom in some more):

According to my calculations, they passed within 100 meters of one another (but my code gives an uncertainty much greater than that.) Each satellite is travelling about 26,900 km/~~second~~ hour (sorry for the typo, but the math holds). I don’t have the mass numbers for the satellite, but even if you think they are travelling at perfect right angles, each kilogram of the mass generates about 28M joules of energy. According to this page on bird strikes, a major league fastball is about 112 joules, a rifle bullet is about 5,000 joules, and a hand grenade is about 600,000 joules. This collision generated 28M joules per kilogram of mass. Ouch!

Addendum: It’s been a long time since I took basic physics. If you care, you shouldn’t trust my math, you should do it yourself and send me corrections. 🙂

First Weather Picture from NOAA-19

Update: If you do a search for NOAA 19 on google, this blog post actually makes it to the front page. Some of you might be looking for information as to how you can listen for it. I use a Radio Shack Pro-60 scanner, tuned to 137.9125 Mhz, set in WFM mode, and my hand held antenna. I’ll try to make a video of my complete setup soon, and link it here… Now, back to the original posting.

Well, not really it’s first picture, but the first picture that I received. NOAA-19 is the last of the U.S. series that will transmit APT imagery, which is the simple analog format that I can receive using my super cheap setup. It’s also the satellite that was badly damaged during tested when the technicians failed to secure it before tilting it, resulting in millions in damage. It was finally launched on February 6th.

Anyway… here’s the picture, one of my better ones! It looks like both images are sending the same data here (I understand the satellite is still in testing mode).

Pass was recorded Feb 8, 2009, beginning around 21:18 UTC.

Addendum: Here’s the picture of the satellite accident.

New Japanese Satellite — PRISM

Got a quick recording of the PRISM satellite, launched on the 23rd, as it came over my location. It was booming in, very fast Doppler. Here’s a recording and a quick spectrum of it, click on the image to get the spectrum of the 2 minute mp3 recording.