During the week starting 18 July, members of AMSAT-UK performed temperature testing and thermo vacuum testing of the FUNcube satellite. The facilities to do this were very kindly offered by the Assembly, Integration and Verification (AIV) facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, at Harwell, near Oxford. AMSAT-UK are extremely grateful to them for helping and advising us. The boards we tested were our ‘Engineering Models’ (EMs) which are just about identical to those that will fly. Below are some pictures of the facilities, and the team.

In summary (as at Wed 20 July) we have determined that the stack operates down to a temp of minus 10 degs C and up to +60 degs C and survived storage at -30 and +70. These results were obtained by the use of a temperature controlled oven in air. On Tuesday evening we transferred the stack to a thermo vacuum chamber, and are continuing testing.

AMSAT-UK is aiming to complete the thermo vacuum testing by Friday morning, leaving the rest of Friday to apply glue to the structure, and mount it in its ‘POD’ ready for vibration testing on Monday.

The temperature is measured by the means of thermocouples which are mounted in different places on the ‘stack’, one on the PA final amplifier device, one on the microprocessor of the CCT Board, one on the RF board near the rx local oscillator, and the fourth one on the structure. When in the air oven the readings from the thermocouples are noted down manually. In the thermo vacuum chamber these reading are logged automatically once per minute.

All the telemetry sent by the stack is being logged, via a FUNcube dongle, so in this way we will be able to calibrate some of FUNcube’s temperature sensors.