LY2013SAT QSL card received by Andy Thomas G0SFJ

To celebrate the upcoming launch of LituanicaSAT-1 the special event station LY2013SAT operated by Vilmantas Morkunas LY3BY has been on the air. Andy Thomas G0SFJ was one of the those who worked it and he was rewarded with a QSL card showing LituanicaSAT-1 in space.

Kibo Robot Arm CubeSat Deployment

Two Lithuanian amateur radio satellites will be among the 32 CubeSats to be sent by Nanoracks LLC to the International Space Station (ISS) on the SpaceX CRS-3 mission in January, 2014.

They will be deployed from the ISS by the JEM Small Satellite Orbital Deployer (J-SSOD) of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

The Kaunas University of Technology developed LituanicaSAT-1 and the Lithuanian Space Federation developed LitSat-1. It is understood that both will carry amateur radio transponders.

The satellites were built in 2013 which was the 80th anniversary of the historic flight by Lithuanian pilots Steponas Darius and Stasys Girėnas in the airplane Lituanica. On July 15, 1933, they took off from Floyd Bennett Field in New York and flew across the Atlantic Ocean, covering a distance of 6,411 kilometers without landing, in 37 hours and 11 minutes. Tragically they crashed by the village of Kuhdamm, near Soldin, Germany just 650 km from their destination of Kaunas in Lithuania.

The IARU coordinated frequencies for the two CubeSats are:

LituanicaSAT-1
• FM Transponder Uplink 145.950 MHz Downlink 435.180 MHz
• AX25 Uplink 145.850 MHz AX25 Downlink 437.550 MHz
• CW Beacon 437.275 MHz
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Lituanicasat1

LitSat-1
• SSB Transponder Uplink 435.180 MHz Downlink 145.950 MHz
• AX25 Uplink 437.550 MHz Downlink 145.850 MHz
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/palydovas

Google English article on the two Lithuanian CubeSats http://tinyurl.com/LithuanianCubeSats

1933 Lituanica flight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanica