FUNcube-1 Launch Day Mug

To start with a few stats:

From the acquisition of the first signal by ZS1LS on Thursday, November 21 we have had a steady stream of data flowing in.
A few Data Warehouse statistics as at 12:00 UT, Nov. 28, 2013:
– over 12MB of unique data uploaded and stored
– 424 user registrations since 2013-11-17
– 319 users have have uploading data
– 41388 Real-time entries
– 11754 Whole Orbit Data entries
– 77940 High Resolution entries
We are very grateful for all this data which is invaluable to the command team – please continue to send it to the Warehouse if you can and encourage other to do so.

Fitter Message 9:

What are the funny characters in the FM9 slot?

Well the command stations can re-purpose FM9 to either be a “normal” fitter message or to carry the debug data that is displayed at the bottom of the Dashboard. This carries info about various status flags and other parameters.
The format is described here

“in short Fitter message 9, when we are running in debug mode starts of with 0xFF that’s how we know its debug, then what follows is just a byte for byte copy of some of the in memory structures from the running MCU, filling up the rest of the fitter message is an MCU program trace (read from right to left) the letter indicates the source file, the number is the line number in that source file. The spaces are where the MCU has finished processing and has gone back to wait for more events.”

Schedule for next few days:

We plan to command FUNcube-1 into continuous amateur/transponder mode for a few orbits on either the 09:22 UT or 10:58 UT passes over the UK tomorrow. We will be doing this to see how this change affects the on-board temperatures. We will switch it back to the normal autonomous schedule either 12:35 UT or 20:31 UT passes depending upon the results of these tests.

No other changes to the operating schedule are currently planned.

UPDATE December 1:

Apologies to everyone who was expecting the transponder to be active during daylight today.

A late change of plan by the team means that we did not send that command but concentrated on testing some other functionality. As a result, the sharp eyed will notice that one of the ANTS Data sensor channels has been commanded “OFF” (this shows as failed” on the Dashboard). It does NOT indicate any problem with the on board systems though.

The spacecraft will continue with its autonomous schedule for the time being.

Nico, PA0DLO, has recently emailed his observations which align with our own understanding of the current situation:

“AMSAT-OSCAR-73, ZACube 1 and HiNCube were launched from the same ISIPOD.

As they initially were close together, the JSpOC decided to release only one TLE  set for this cluster under object number 39417 (2013-066B). Now the distances between these satellites are slowly increasing. So the question is  – which satellite is object 39417?

Detailed Doppler measurements show that ZACube 1 is now about 25 s early compared to the TLE for object 39417, while OSCAR 73 is about 11 s early. This seems to indicate that object 39417 is actually  HiNCube.

Hopefully TLEs for OSCAR 73 and ZACube 1 will be published soon.”

Download the Dashboard App to receive the FUNcube-1 telemetry and upload it to the Data Warehouse.