The Satpack is an ATmega328 controlled satellite tracker with doppler tuning. To calculate the position of the satellite, they use qrpTracker, which is an Arduino friendly program based on James Miller’s Pan-13. Next, the Arduino tunes the radio to listen to the transmitted Morse code. Amazing! It’s open source, so check out the link for a lot more information on building your own Satpack.
Here’s a video of the Satpack code tracking a few satellites. Note that the tone of the cubesat drifts a bit. The keps were a bit old, but in a addition, I just got a letter from James Miller, the author of Plan 13 who recommends some constants that are more in keeping with the earth model used in today’s GPS engines.
The Virginian-Pilot reports that when fifth-grader Tristan Jolley of Mack Benn Jr. Elementary school wasn’t picked to attend this year’s NASA student symposium in Houston, he was disappointed – motivated, too.
If anything, he said, it made him want to work harder. So he sent a balloon up to near space and captured some great video.
He won’t get a grade for his work, his teacher Liz Petry said she wants students to take risks and to learn from the process.
In 1992 Southern California Amateur Radio operators uplinked a video of stand-up comedian Jay Leno, host of NBC’s The Tonight Show, to the Space Shuttle Columbia through Jim Steffen, KC6A’s station in Long Beach, California.
Watch Jay Leno – SAREX Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment 1992
This video shows Tony Hutchison VK5ZAI on the Channel 7 Today Tonight TV show talking about amateur radio and the ARISS schools program.
Tony Hutchison, VK5ZAI's ARISS Satellite Ground Station in Kingston SE. South Australia
The show provides some great insights as to how Amateur Radio can provide support for NASA as well as raise public awareness through the ARISS schools program.
Tony VK5ZAI has provided many Telebridge links for the International Space Station (ISS) to schools around the world. An ISS Telebridge contact is where a dedicated ARISS amateur radio ground station, located somewhere in the world, establishes the radio link with the ISS. Voice communications between the students and the astronauts are then patched over regular telephone lines.
John Klingelhoeffer, WB4LNM, AubieSat-1 Technical Mentor at Auburn University Alabama reports that the satellite has been successfully commanded to change the transmission mode.
John says “A short message was received Saturday evening indicating that uplink commands sent to AubieSat-1 were properly received, decoded, and initiated additional telemetry downlink data. AS-1 has been in orbit for about 9 months. Stations are asked to continue to monitor the downlink and pass any received telemetry to the group here for dissemination.”
Watch Reception of AubieSat-1 at K5QXJ
AubieSat-1 was launched from Vandenberg AFB, California in October, 2011. The CubeSat is an undergraduate built satellite developed by Auburn University. Over the weekend of June 9-11 the AubieSat-1 controllers changed the transmission mode of the satellite to increase the quantity of telemetry. The increased telemetry rate will provide data to indicate how well solar cell protection is working. It should also provide additional onboard housekeeping information.
AubieSat-1 transmits with a power of about 800 milliwatts on a frequency of 437.475 MHz. The beacon signal, along with telemetry, is sent using A1A continuous wave Morse code at 20 words per minute. Additional telemetry from the onboard science experiment will use CW transmissions up to 60 WPM.
ISS Amateur Radio Project Engineer Kenneth Ransom, N5VHO reports the ARISS AX.25 digipeater has changed frequency from 145.825 MHz (up/down) to 437.550 MHz (up/down). The same digi alias ARISS is still used.
This change was started with the docking of the ESA Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV). The ATV is an expendable, unmanned resupply spacecraft delivering propellant, water, air, payloads and experimental supplies to the International Space Station (ISS).
International Space Station
Packet radio operations were moved to the Columbus Module UHF radio when the Kenwood D700 radio was recently powered off due to needing an additional air purifier to support the ATV. Normally the air purifier is located in the ATV but recent power support issues related to the ATV and ISS necessitated the system be relocated to the Service Module.
The purifier is now using the power outlet that the Kenwood radio normally uses. The Russian team has agreed to briefly power the purifier off for the scheduled ARISS school events but then will re-activate the purifier right afterwards. This appears to be a long term impact as ATV is currently scheduled to depart from ISS in September.
AMSAT-UK 
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