First FUNCube-1 telemetry successfully received

The telemetry frame showing the various parameters

Wa-hey! I have now managed to receive and decode my first telemetry frames from the FUNCube-1 satellite. This was on the pass starting at 09:10 on 22/11/13. There'll be another higher angle pass at 10:45 (22/11) over the UK.

I used a loft-mounted Slim Jim antenna for 2m and my Icom IC-7400 transceiver on 145.935MHz USB.

I fed the audio out of the back of the radio through my usual isolation interface, used for PSK and RTTY, into a Dell PC running the FUNCube-1 dashboard.  I only managed a few decent frames as the pass was low angle (about 9 degrees max) and my set up is not exactly optimal in terms of antenna and feeder (I don't do much VHF). But hey, it worked!

 The X- panel temperature rises during the orbit

You can quite clearly see the temperature of the spacecraft rise as it comes out of eclipse, plus the telemetry shows that all systems are working, the PA is putting out 287mW and the solar cells putting out about 4V.

The black panels are hotter than the silver, which makes sense.

If you are interested in collecting data form the satellite (which is then automatcailly uploaded to a data warehouse) all the details can be found at http://funcube.org.uk.

It isn't too difficult, but just follow the instructions carefully.

Steve G0KYA

FUNCube-1 satellite launched successfully

The FUNcube-1 cubesat launched successfully this morning aboard a Dnepr rocket. It has already been heard in the UK and South Africa. Now the job of making sure everything checks out begins before it is fully ready for use by schools and amateurs.

In the meantime, see if you can hear it.

The frequencies are:

Radio Communications Payload
145.935 MHz BPSK Telemetry 30 or 300 mW

Inverting SSB/CW transponder 300 mW PEP
435.150 – 435.130 MHz Uplink
145.950 – 145.970 MHz Downlink

A program like Orbitron will tell you where the satellite is, although I imagine the Kepplerian elements to track it will be updated over the next few days. The raw ones I have are:

FUNCUBE-1
1 99991U 00000    13325.30956308  .00000106  00000-0  10000-3 0 00010
2 99991 097.7956 038.2570 0059925 198.5190 336.5388 14.77841394000015

Take a look at http://amsat-uk.org/ for up to date info.

Update: I just heard FUNcube-1 on the 21/11 19:52 pass, so the Keps look about right. I used USB on 145.935MHz +/- Doppler. It wasn't very strong, but I was only using a Slim Jim in the loft with some lossy RG58 coax. I think a beam is the way to go.

Here are some predicted passes for the next few days - no promises due to the raw element data that needs to be updated!
2013-11-21 19:52:44 FUNCUBE-1             80.4 10.0  ecl  2114 284.1 -35.7
2013-11-21 19:54:53 FUNCUBE-1             52.5 13.2  ecl  1896 284.6 -36.0
2013-11-21 19:57:01 FUNCUBE-1             24.7 10.0  ecl  2103 285.1 -36.3

2013-11-21 21:25:56 FUNCUBE-1            154.3 10.0  ecl  2118 308.3 -48.3
2013-11-21 21:30:33 FUNCUBE-1             71.7 68.9  ecl   722 309.8 -48.9
2013-11-21 21:35:07 FUNCUBE-1            349.9 10.0  ecl  2099 311.2 -49.4

2013-11-21 23:04:11 FUNCUBE-1            226.1 10.0  ecl  2119 344.2 -56.7
2013-11-21 23:07:27 FUNCUBE-1            271.0 18.6  ecl  1609 345.6 -56.8
2013-11-21 23:10:41 FUNCUBE-1            315.7 10.0  ecl  2107 346.9 -57.0

2013-11-22 10:46:06 FUNCUBE-1             19.3 10.0    ?  2036 166.6  16.2
2013-11-22 10:50:30 FUNCUBE-1            101.6 64.2    ?   691 167.7  16.4
2013-11-22 10:54:45 FUNCUBE-1            184.1 10.1    ?  1968 168.7  16.5

2013-11-22 12:23:19 FUNCUBE-1            348.5 10.0    ?  2037 190.4  16.6
2013-11-22 12:26:32 FUNCUBE-1            301.8 20.0    ?  1458 191.1  16.5
2013-11-22 12:29:41 FUNCUBE-1            254.9 10.0    ?  1991 191.9  16.4

2013-11-22 20:13:39 FUNCUBE-1            101.0 10.0  ecl  2112 288.7 -38.8
2013-11-22 20:16:50 FUNCUBE-1             57.3 18.8  ecl  1596 289.5 -39.3
2013-11-22 20:20:00 FUNCUBE-1             13.4 10.0  ecl  2096 290.2 -39.8

2013-11-22 21:48:09 FUNCUBE-1            169.4 10.1  ecl  2111 315.2 -51.0
2013-11-22 21:52:47 FUNCUBE-1            256.3 77.8  ecl   691 316.7 -51.5
2013-11-22 21:57:23 FUNCUBE-1            343.5 10.0  ecl  2095 318.3 -52.0

2013-11-22 23:28:12 FUNCUBE-1            252.5 10.0  ecl  2114 354.3 -57.6
2013-11-22 23:29:59 FUNCUBE-1            275.4 12.0  ecl  1976 355.1 -57.6
2013-11-22 23:31:46 FUNCUBE-1            298.3 10.0  ecl  2109 355.9 -57.6

Steve G0KYA

Good autumnal HF conditions are back

Got a real shock this morning. Was playing with a little Realistic DX-394 receiver, which is more cute than a serious HF receiver. Anyway, I had it connected to a dipole in the loft and thought I heard someone sending "VK" on 20m CW.

Sure enough it was VK2PN Pat in New South Wales working a host of Europeans. Switching to my Icom 756 Pro 3 and the trusty 20m Off Centre Fed Dipole, which is hung from a tree, and at times he was peaking 599.

I diligently waited my turn to call him - and then he got spotted on the DX cluster. At this point all hell broke loose with OMs, YUs, ITs and everyone else piling in.

Anyway, the moral is that Autumn brings good HF conditions and the greyline long path to Australia suddenly becomes very attractive - see the image from VOAProp above. The K index had been up to 5 overnight, but this path doesn't really go though the poles so was relatively unscathed.

Ten metres was humming on Monday with low power beacons being heard in the UK from Florida and New England. On Tuesday I heard nothing. With the bad geomagnetic conditions on Wednesday night I'm not expected much today.

I expect 10m to the USA to pick up a little later in the month.

So the moral is keep looking on the bands - you never know what you might hear.

Are we past sunspot maximum?

Just two days ago I published a podcast that looked at current solar activity and suggested that we are heading for a double-peaked solar maximum.

Two days later Tad Cook K7RA posted this for the ARRL:

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Much talk lately has centered around a possible dual peak in the current solar cycle. This would follow a pattern established in recent solar cycles. If this is so, the first peak probably occurred in the Fall of 2011. Now it appears that perhaps the second peak was in Spring 2013.

We are just a day away from the end of the month, so we won't see the actual averages until next week, but we can get a pretty close reading knowing the actual numbers for 29 of the 31 days in August.

The average daily sunspot number for the first 29 days of August was 92.2. This is above the levels for June and July, 80.2 and 86.2, but lower than April and May. This also pegs the 3-month average of daily sunspot numbers (centered on July) around 86.1, based on data from 90 of the 92 days in that period. This is above all of the three-month moving averages centered on September 2012 through March 2013, but lower than the previous three periods centered on April and May (106.4) and 97.5 for June.

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While working out when solar maximum is has always been an historical activity - you don't know you are there until some months later - this may not bode well for this Autumn. So start praying to the Sun Gods for more sunspots as an SFI of 100 is nothing to get too excited about.

But as I said in the podcast, conditions will improve naturally as we head towards late September due to a change in the ionosphere's molecular/atomic ratio (and therefore recombination rate) due to seasonal changes anyway. If you are looking for decent trans-Atlantic HF propagation it will be coming along soon. But we may have already seen the best of the decent 10m worldwide propagation - at least for another 10 years or so. Ho hum!

Podcast: HF Propagation, Autumn 2013

In this month's podcast I look at the current solar conditions and how the peak of cycle 24 may have already passed. I then look at what we can expect on the HF bands this Autumn and why conditions are likely to be better than they have been this summer.

Click on the headline to listen to the programme online or if you prefer to listen to it on your iPod search for G0KYA on iTunes.

Eliminating EMC problems

I gave a talk to my local club on eliminating EMC or RFI problems in the shack. This looked at how you can stop causing interference to yourself and to others.

It also looked at how electrical items around the house can also interfere with you (although I haven't included the videos in the attached PDF document).

These included everything from the washing machine (wipes out 30m) to the shaver charger (puts a noise out across the whole of HF).

Nevertheless, you are welcome to download the presentation handouts.

The “Kaz” directional MW antenna

The Kaz gives a deep null in one direction.

I have always had a soft spot for Medium Wave and a couple of years ago I decided to take MW DXing a little more seriously. The goal was to hear some North American stations – it couldn't be that hard could it? Well, yes it seems it could!

The first season saw me using my Icom 756 Pro 3 and my usual 80m dipole antenna, but nothing of any significance was heard.

It seems the 756 Pro 3 is deliberately deaf on MW and you can't use the pre-amp. I also listened on a portable MW receiver but that was no better, even with a small 12-inch Tecsun passive loop. The next season I used an RF Space SDR-IQ, but the pickings were thin.

So last year I upgraded to a Perseus SDR and a Wellbrook ALA1530S loop so that I could record the whole of Medium Wave two minutes before the hour to two minutes past to aid with stations IDs. Now we were getting somewhere, with WBBR 1130 kHz (New York) and NBC 1510 kHz (Boston) being heard regularly, although I wasn't hearing anything like the DX other MW enthusiasts in the UK were reporting.

 I actually monitored WBBR every hour, every night for two months to compare reception alongside the daily DsT index, but I can't say I saw a correlation. Anyway, this coming winter I'm determined to try harder and so I need an antenna that will null or attenuate signals from the continent. I ended up choosing a passive design called a “Kaz”, named after its designer Neil Kazaross.

Very simply, the antenna is part of the Flag/Pennant terminated loop family. It is an isosceles triangle with a base of 40ft and the apex at 10ft. One corner (FB) is fed with an impedance transformer and the other corner (TB) is terminated with a resistor between the two legs.

It actually turned out to be really good.

Read the full review of the Kaz antenna.