Mock-up showing typical size of a PocketQube satellite
The UK’s University of Birmingham, the University of Malta, the Malta Amateur Radio League (MARL) and the Italian Astrodynamics company, GAUSS Srl are collaborating on a project to send a PocketQube satellite with an amateur radio payload into space.
The Times of Malta newspaper reports:
The 5x5x5 cm device, referred to as a PocketQube pico-satellite, will be launched in 2018 into a sun-synchronous low earth orbit (LEO) and will be used to validate on-board equipment that will study the properties the Earth’s ionosphere.
This project will pave the way for a swarm of eight such satellites that will spread over a large geographical area and hence gain better coverage of changeable ionospheric conditions which affect radio communications.
The collaboration has brought together two Maltese post graduate engineering students – Darren Cachia in Malta and Jonathan Osairiis Camilleri (Ozzy), a Ph.D. student at the University of Birmingham – who have joined efforts and are developing the satellite platform and the scientific payload respectively.
The mission is expected to last about 18 months and will relay information back to Earth that will be accessible to anyone owning a simple ham radio set. Information will be made available in due course to allow schools and interested individuals to participate using inexpensive equipment.
Tom Scott was given a tour of the Innovative Space Logistics clean room facility by Wouter Weggelaar PA3WEG. He got to see the FUNcube-1 Engineering Model and the new Nayif-1 CubeSat which carries an amateur radio SSB/CW linear transponder.
Welcome to Innovative Space Logistics, in the Netherlands: they invited me inside their clean room to see an actual CubeSat satellite that’s going into space soon! (No, this isn’t a sponsored video: I paid my own way there!) Go look at their site: http://isilaunch.com/ – and if you need to send something into space, get in touch with them!
The International Space Station (ISS) signal will be audible over the British Isles and Europe on 145.800 MHz FM and streamed live on the ARISS Principia website which is going through a webhosting test right now.
UK astronaut Tim Peake KG5BVI / GB1SS
School presentation:
This contact is a collaborative project between three schools in Norfolk and their local university, UEA. Norwich School employ an Ogden Trust Teaching Fellow whose job is 50% dedicated to Physics outreach and she has led the project.
City of Norwich School (CNS) are hosting the link up. Reepham High School have an observatory on site and are hosting a ‘spot the station’ event.
36 schools have signed up to be a part of all we have planned and have each received an age-appropriate radio kit for use in lessons and clubs funded by RCUK through the UEA.
Students will ask as many of the following questions as time allows.
Principia Mission Patch
1. Maddy (Aged 13): What do you do if you cut yourself really badly in space?
2. Austin (Aged 16): Are there any protocols or guidance in place if George Clooney comes knocking on the front door as he did in the film Gravity?
3. Sophie (Aged 13): What experiment would you like to add to the program based on the experiences you have had?
4. Max (Aged 11): Do you notice that you are missing natural sunlight and fresh air and in what ways is this affecting you?
5. TBD (Aged 11): How do you get changed in space, won’t your clothes go everywhere?
6. Eden (Aged 12): One of the experiments you are conducting in space is to measure fluid shifts in the body, how does this help us back on Earth?
7. Thomas (Aged 14): Do you think there will be a jump in the design of spacecraft as many are now old?
8. Emily (Aged 13): How different was the training compared to actually going into space?
9. Millie (Aged 15): Do you think the experiments carried out in space will increase in number as the technology improves or will there be technology to recreate this environment on Earth?
10. Erin (Aged 16): Which materials being developed with the electromagnetic levitator will have the largest impact on the development of greener living?
11. Lola (Aged 11): Since being in space have your dreams been different to those on earth?
12. TBD (Aged 11): If everyone in Britain turned their lights on and off at the same time, would you see it?
13. Ella (Aged 17): Which part of the Earth do you like orbiting over the most and why?
14. Amy (Aged 16): I understand that you experience sunrise and sunset sixteen times a day on board the ISS, are you aware of it and does it affect your body clock?
15. Mimi (Aged 11): Do you feel insignificant up in space because perhaps there may be life beyond our planet?
16. Bruno (Aged 15): Is there a song or a piece of art that you think reproduces the feeling of being in a non-gravity zone, if so which one?
17. Aruneesh (Aged 14): Do you play any anti-gravity sport up in space?
18. TBD (Aged 12): If you could live on or explore any planet, which would it be and why?
19. James (Aged 10): If you were allowed to change one feature of a planet, which one would it be and why?
20. Tom (Aged 14): As a plane ascends in the atmosphere, we are told to blow our noses or swallow to minimise pain. How do you deal with this with the g-force you experience in the rocket?
ARISS offers an opportunity for students to experience the excitement of Amateur Radio by talking directly with crew members onboard the International Space Station. Teachers, parents and communities see, first hand, how Amateur Radio and crew members on ISS can energize youngsters’ interest in science, technology and learning.
BBC TV news has reported on the successful amateur radio contact between astronaut Tim Peake GB1SS on the ISS and students at the Oasis Academy Brightstowe GB1OAS. The contact took place on Friday, February 19, 2016 and the students were able to question Tim about life in space.
One of those asking a question was 15-year-old Seema who came to the UK from Afghanistan in 2013 joining Oasis Academy Brightstowe in February speaking hardly any English. By the autumn term of 2013 she had achieved enough to move into top sets in all her subjects. Her aim is to be the first female Afghan astronaut, Tim told her it was a “wonderful idea and ambition” and that she should “follow her dreams”.
HamTV dish antenna at Goonhilly – Credit Frank Heritage M0AEU
As well as the two-way voice amateur radio contact the students were able to see Tim Peake via a Digital Amateur Television (DATV) HamTV transmission from the International Space Station on 2395 MHz.
This transmission was received at an amateur radio station installed by British Amateur Television Club (BATC) and AMSAT-UK members at Goonhilly and streamed to the school via the web.
There was an additional mobile DATV receiver at the school, developed by volunteers from BATC, which received the ISS amateur TV transmission directly.
Ahead of the amateur radio link up with ISS astronaut Tim Peake GB1SS, planned for 1440 GMT on Friday, February 26, 120 pupils aged 10 to 18, from 21 schools across Norfolk and Suffolk, gathered at City of Norwich (CNS) for a special Ground Control Day.
Tim Peake KG5BVI preparing for his spacewalk in January
As well as a keynote speech from Helen Mason, a reader in solar physics at Cambridge University, the event covered the technical side of the radio link itself, and issues to do with physics and space more generally.
Tim Hare M6HTJ, a Year 10 pupil at CNS who is himself a radio ham enthusiast, will lead the space linkup, said: “It’s going to be incredible. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity that very few people will be able to have.”
Maddy Flett, a Year 8 pupil at CNS, said science is “not a subject I would jump to first”, but she really enjoyed Ground Control Day.
She is one of 10 pupils chosen to question Mr Peake, and will ask what astronauts do if they cut themselves.
On February 13, Michelle Thompson W5NYV released her latest AMSAT Phase 4B Ground Engineering Report.
Michelle has nine years experience in embedded hardware and software design and is managing the digital ground station program in support of a digital payload for an AMSAT geosynchronous satellite opportunity called Phase 4.
Watch Phase 4B Weekly Report February 13, 2016
So what happened when I finally got to the lab? Well, we able to obtain an example flow graph, with some controversy between installations, for DVB. Here is a DVB S2 transmitter in GNUradio. After some troubleshooting to get it to work with the X310, we saw an output waveform using the built-in instruments in GNUradio. Here’s the list of blocks availabe in mainstream GNUradio for DVB. Isn’t this great? Note that there is already DVB-S2X, although it has not been completely tested due to the lack of receivers. Wouldn’t it be great if we could help out here?
Next, we transmitted a test signal. It looked a bit puny at first, but we found the settings for gain and improved performance a bit. In other advancements, the HackRF team submitted their first pull request in their documentation. Here’s an FM receiver implementation based on Michael Ossmann’s wonderful tutorials about using HackRF and GNUradio at https://greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/
We tried to receive with DVB-T RTL-SDR dongles, but haven’t quite gotten this to work yet!
If you are anywhere in the ballpark about being interested in SDRs, then watch these videos. If it seems remotely interesting, then consider joining up our team and participating. It’s a lot of fun and we need you.
Here’s the instrumentation of the FM broadcast band experiment. The waterfall shows the stations clearly.
Next up is something I wanted to point out to those of you interested in microwave experimentation. Here’s the band plan for 10GHz. Note that our downlink is in the Space, Earth, and Telecommand sub band. Note that right next door is an analog and digital band, where bandwidths greater than 1Mhz are welcome. That would be us, wearing our terrestrial hats.
We’re looking at making the radio autonomously determine what it’s listening to, and act accordingly. This is a band plan that works to our advantage since we believe we can use the same IF of 700MHz for both modes.
We use Github for all our documentation and software. If you need to learn about github, there are many tutorials at github. You can get off the ground and to the point where you are forking and pulling like a pro. Check it out.
Next up, something totally different. We want the user interface for Phase 4 Ground to be really good. We are visual creatures. One of the projects for visualization of contact history is DynamicQSL. This project is focused on exploring, researching, developing, and publishing an open source application that takes your log of QSOs and produces a beautiful representation of your activity with other stations.
If you have only contacted a station once, then the resulting QSL card for you and them is simple. If you have had a lot of contacts, then it’s complex and rich. The inputs to the DynamicQSL are whatever you’ve chosen for your QSL card image, or perhaps your avatar on Phase 4 Ground. So far, it’s clear that automatically generating fractal images is not going to easily work. Choosing a good fractal image requires a human curator to make good art. Using tree diagrams means the card is predictable and boring. However, there’s another way. There’s a wonderful book about algorithmically produced art called Creating Symmetry: The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns by Frank A. Farris. This seems to be a winner.
Here’s something I made in a few lines of code using SageMath online. Try out this open source alternative to MATLAB at http://www.sagemath.org. All the code for the DynamicQSL experiments is in the visualizations directory of the documents repository at Phase 4 Ground’s github site.
I’m hoping to work with Zach Leffke KJ4QLP at Virgina Tech to find students with an artistic and programming background to join this project and create a wonderful aspect to our user interface on Phase 4. There is nothing stopping this from being an entirely standalone project that anyone with a QSO log can use. The goal is to feed in a log and have beautiful dynamic cards, possibly animated to show contacts over time, produced so that the operator can display or send them. So Zach, if you’re listening, I will be writing you as soon as I can with a lot more details.
None of this is possible without your support. Please join ARRL and AMSAT if you are not a member already. They make this project possible. If you want to help the project, then join at http://www.amsat.org/?page_id=1096 or contact me directly. You don’t have to be an expert, you just have to want to become one. I will meet you wherever you are, and help you out as best I can. Until next week!
AMSAT-UK 
You must be logged in to post a comment.