I've mostly been posting about it on Twitter.
AO-92 has a cell that's failing, and towards the end of many eclipses it goes into auto-safe mode at 3.6v. If the battery drops low enough the IHU resets, and it comes back up in normal safe mode. Mark and I have been commanding to repeater mode on the first available pass after the resets, but it's not a long term sustainable answer. Last night Mark commanded the transmitter completely off while we consider a plan of action.
Leaving autosafe on and the tx off, we may be able to turn the repeater on ad-hoc for weekends or such, completely dependent on command station availability. Turning autosafe and the IHU off like we did with AO-85 will kill the satellite pretty quickly, so that's not a good response either. So, we'll look at resets and battery states before this weekend and see where we stand.
73, Drew KO4MA AMSAT VP Operations
-----Original Message----- From: AMSAT-BB amsat-bb-bounces@amsat.org On Behalf Of Roy Dean via AMSAT-BB Sent: Monday, September 14, 2020 4:55 PM To: amsat-bb@amsat.org Subject: [amsat-bb] AO-92
I can find no information about AO-92 going silent recently. Was it commanded into a silent state (as AO-85 was shortly before it went silent permanently)?
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