What Bob forgot to mention about BRICSAT-1 is that it carries a set of experimental electric thrusters from George Washington University. If you can help recover BRICSAT so that its thrusters can be fired, you would be helping to obtain performance data on the thrusters which could be valuable input to future AMSAT mission proposals. The HEO satellite proposal needs a small thruster for orbit maintenance. This satellite mission is important to AMSAT, let's get out the AMSAT can-do spirit and help recover this satellite!
73, Dan Schultz N8FGV
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BRICSAT-1 recovery challenge
If anyone has 9600 baud satellite capability and is looking for a challenge, you could be successful in recovering BRICSAT (NO83). BRICSAT simply has a negative power budget. When it wakes up, it should be possible to get in the command to tell it to turn off unnecessary loads and then let it achieve full recovery. As is, it wakes up, sends a few feeble 20 second packets and dies again.
Bricsat has another excellent PSK31 transpodner on it too. You can detect BRICSAT when it awakes by the 20 second packet on the downlink OR by the occasional PSK31 beacon on 435.350 MHz (+/- Doppler). Do not be confused by PSAT which also has a PSK31 tranpsonder on the same frequency. But they have different audio tones for the beacon.
Downlink: 437.975 MHz, 9600 baud Uplink: 145.825 MHz, 9600 baud Latest ?guess? at the TLE (not sure if this is BRICSat) 1 90722U 15294.38156592 +.00051032 +00000-0 +11686-2 0 0166 2 90722 054.9895 030.6075 0226665 199.3544 159.8861 15.1979213102332
The commands are simple keyboard dumb terminal commands. If you think you want to take on this challenge, contact us. (bruninga at usna.edu)
[ANS thanks Bob WB4APR and Jin KB3UKS for the above information]