Most everyone knows about Funcube and how successful it has been. If you look at the Funcube Warehouse page you will see that many hams around the world are uploading data from the satellite every day. As of this morning I counted 493 different ground stations and they have uploaded more than 1.15 Million data packets since late November. About half of the stations are located in the US and Britain. The other half are spread out around the world showing that this is not just something that has interested those in the UK. Thirty- three stations have each uploaded more than 10,000 packets!
In addition I have to give accolades to Mark Spencer, WA8SME, at the ARRL for his excellent paper describing Funcube, its experiments and how to receive it and make sense of the data. Most everyone on the birds asks about what antennas work best. Mark seeks to quantify the performance of some common antennas like the M2 circular polarized beam, Arrows on rotors or fixed, with or without preamps, 5/8 wave and 1/4 wave ground planes. He does that by comparing the number of packets received on each antenna during a pass. The results are quite interesting. You can download the paper at: http://www.arrl.org/files/file/ETP/FUNCube%20Guide.pdf
Mark is the reason that the Teacher's Institute has been so successful. If you operate on the satellites you probably have heard his student teachers making contacts on the birds. When he was living on the west coast he went to DN01 and DN00 and put them on the birds for those of us that chase grids. After moving to the east coast he has continued the work with satellites at the League and has developed hardware for satellites including the FT817 interface and most recently a portable az/el rotator system. We see articles about satellites in QST Magazine on a regular basis and I'm sure it is because of his representation at the League. The younger generation is the future of AMSAT and Mark's work is certainly making a difference in terms of introducing them to satellites.
The Funcube team and G6LVB have certainly encouraged our young people to get interested in ham radio and satellites. The Funcube SDR was a great fundraiser and facilitated students in their quest to receive data from space and learn from the experiments on board. Congratulations to everyone involved in the highly successful Funcube project.
73, John K8YSE