On April 25th, 2015 an amateur radio meeting (in Dutch: “Interessedag Amateursatellieten”) will be held for everyone who is interested in amateur radio satellites. It will be held in Apeldoorn, The Netherlands. We are very pleased to join this day with the annual VHF day held by the Dutch amateur radio society VERON.
Source: Dutch Satellite day 2015
Dear Radio Amateur / Masat-1 Packet Committer,
We would like to hereby thank you for supporting our work in the last almost three years by receiving packets of Masat-1 from space. Furthermore, we would like to call your attention to the upcoming deorbiting. Masat-1, the first Hungarian satellite is expected to end its successful mission by burning while entering the Earth’s atmosphere at the beginning of January (current forecast predicts 11 January). The last days and hours of the satellite are especially important for us, providing valuable data for our upcoming endeavours, therefore we would like to keep a close eye on the satellite during the final stage of the mission. For this, we need the help of all those who have already received Masat-1, as the last moments of the satellite’s life may happen anywhere around the Earth. Who will receive the last packets of Masat-1? Following the final moments we will provide an answer to this question, and we also plan to publish a statistics of those stations who received the highest number of packets during the last 168 hours of the mission.
We have published the current version of the JAVA client software on our website.
Wishing you all the best and Merry Christmas, The Masat-1 Development Team.
Deorbit prediction made by DK3WN.
Today december 20 ISS will transmit SSTV images. Below an overview with the passes over Europe. Good luck with receiving the images.
Here is an example that is transmitted by ISS and received by DK3WN last Thursday december 18.
Today, more than one year after launch, there will be a temporary end of operations caused by the end of funding.
However, UWE-3 is in a very good health condition with fully charged batteries and operations may be continued depending on future research plans.
Without any reception from ground, UWE-3 will carry out a warm reset every four days and switch regularly between the redundant on-board processors and radios. Therefore, UWE-3 will switch back to its nominal frequency of 437,385 MHz.
Nevertheless we appreciate the extensive support we received from the HAM amateurs in the past and hope that also in the future the status of UWE-3 will be monitored with your support, like you did so many times in the past year. Thank you so much for the very helpful cooperation in this respect!
Yours sincerely,
UWE-3 Team
Today a surprise in the mail, I have received two QSL cards from the Delfispace team. Thank you very much and I hope the satellite building tradition will continue in the coming years. The next satellites will be Delta and Phi (DelFFi) and the launch is scheduled for next year.
Delfi-C3
Delfi-n3Xt
Dear Radio Amateur Operators,
Delfi-n3Xt is now in orbit for 1 year. We have been able to demonstrate the T3µPS micro-propulsion payload and the ITRX transceiver payload and have executed the a-Si:H solar cell experiment. We have also tested many of the CubeSat bus advancements: the electrical power subsystem with the battery system, robust command and data handling and an advanced attitude determination and control subsystem, comprising our custom-developed reaction wheels, magnetorquers and sun sensors. Analysis has proven that many systems and components performed as expected, while for some lessons are drawn to improve upon in the future. This shows the great achievements on the technical objectives of the mission. Last but not least, Delfi-n3Xt has trained over 80 students on a real satellite project and many of those students have now entered a professional career in the space sector. After 3 months, Delfi-n3Xt has achieved its ambitious primary mission objectives and we have concluded on a mission success!
After three months of operations, we have unfortunately lost contact with the satellite after an experiment with a transponder module for radio amateurs. We have performed many attempts to recover from this situation, but they were not successful so far. Despite of this, Delfi-n3Xt is a successful mission and also is a good and solid foundation for future space engineering projects like the current DelFFi mission. DelFFi is a formation flying demonstration mission with two identical 3U CubeSats developed at TU Delft and is part of the QB50 project in which the thermosphere is going to be characterized by 50 CubeSats carrying a standard sensor suite for in-situ atmospheric measurements. This ambitious mission will push our Delfi roadmap one step further. Delfi-n3Xt acts as a stepping stone towards this mission, and many technical elements have found their way in the DelFFi design.
We would like to thank all radio amateurs for helping us by receiving data of Delfi-n3Xt.
Source: J. Bouwmeester, Delfi CubeSat Program Manager