Hi Folks,
It seems amazing to us that FUNcube-1 - AO73, was launched nearly one year ago, in fact at 07:10 UTC on 21 Nov 2013. The very first signals were received by ZS1LS in South Africa at 07:37 UTC and he was even able to upload the resulting data to the Warehouse so the results could be seen immediately.
We are extremely happy to say that, since then, the satellite has been performing very satisfactorily, the battery voltage doesn't drop below 8 volts, and becomes fully charged within about 7 - 10 minutes after re-entering sunlight from eclipse.
Thus, on 21 Nov 2014, we will be celebrating the satellite's first birthday. To mark the occasion, we will be activating the transponder earlier than normal - late on Thursday 20 Nov 2014, so that it will be available for use during the whole of Friday. So please make as many contacts as possible through the transponder during Friday, FUNcube's actual birthday. You are invited to make a note of any stations worked on this day, or any other comments on the FUNcube Forum. Please use the existing "FUNcube-1's Birthday" topic, under the Welcome heading. The URL of the Forum is http://forum.funcube.org.uk/index.php.
Please also remember the '73 on 73' competition which is kindly being organised by Paul Stoetzer N8HM. See http://amsat-uk.org/2014/08/18/73-on-73-award-announcement/ for more details.
We would like to take this opportunity of thanking all of our 'users', both those who download telemetry and forwarding it to the warehouse, and of course, all users of the transponder. This telemetry data is invaluable, both as an educational resource and to enable us to see how the spacecraft systems are performing and surviving. So far we have collected almost 400MB of unique data via stations from all around the world.
Of course we are hoping that the satellite continues to function nominally for several more years to come even though we may never reach AO7's record!
73s AMSAT-UK and AMSAT-NL