A great day in the Satelliite Lab!
Not only did we hear ISS, and Command up PCSAT, but also on today's last day of class, we distributed 5 LABsats throught the campus in undisclosed locations hanging on strings so that the students had to use Telemetry, and Command, and then the imager and sun/magnetometer sensors to align the comm links and then activate the on-board cameras to see where they were.
They were scored on how well they could align their best solar panel to the sun, and how well they could change attitude to use the camera.
The first link on this LABsat web page has this final 4 page lab (a word doc): www.aprs.org/labsats.html that summarizes the experiments.
Just a lot of fun on the last day of class. Over the semester they incrementally assemble various components of these TNC based satellites going through 33 lab periods and exercises culminating in this final operations scenario.
The icing on the cake was that today was also the first day of PCSAT return to full sun, and also hearing the ISS crew on voice all during the same lab. But PCSAT did not hold, and died on the next orbit for the next class. We will resume restoration attempts tomorrow.
These LABsats use nothing more than a KPC-3 TNC for all telemetry, command and control, and an $88 Alinco HT for comms. They use $75 2.4 GHz TV cameras for their imaging experiments.
Bob, WB4APR USNA Satellite Lab