Dear All,

FYI

The following ground stations received the Mauritius Amateur Radio Society (MARS) Silver Awards:

1) 3B8GF

2) IK7HTB

3) ZR6AIC

4) EA4SG

5) JKC3B8, John Kennedy College the 3rd educational organization in Mauritius to receive a MARS award.

6) PHRSSS, Professor Hassan Rafa State Secondary School the 4th educational organization in Mauritius to receive same, they were the second school to receive the signals of our bird but had to issues to upload the telemetry to Satnogs, they succeeded now.

see: https://mars3b8.wordpress.com/news/

It is worth noting that other teams, about 16 more, from other educational organizations are putting up their ground stations in Mauritius, this fully in line with AMSAT Ambassador program, the MIR-SAT 1 and MARS objectives to promote STEM and HAM radio. Hopefully this will inspire many students to take their radio amateur license and become active members of the community in future.

Also, there are still 16 Silver Awards and 40 Bronze Awards to be issued to recognize the achievement of ground stations receiving MIR-SAT 1 and forwarding telemetry to Satnogs. The application form at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdCAAKTMtTmARDwrjIE_Coai1WR9b2zUFjBPFbOghMe63gqdg/viewform must be filed to receive the Awards.

Thanks to all uploading telemetry of MIR-SAT 1 to Satnogs which is quite useful.

The satellite is still under testing and commissioning phase. The operation team still busy with a few issues with both the command ground station and the satellite, minor items but just taking more time than expected initially.

Jean Marc (3B8DU)