Hi all,
another status update of the Delfi-C3 / DO-64 satellite:
1. The spacecraft continues to work fine, we have received over 270000 telemetry frames so far, thanks so much!
2. A magnificent model of the satellite, made by Stefan Wagener VE4NSA is available on our photo weblog at
http://www.delfic3.nl/photoblog/
3. The spacecraft still experiences the downlink dropout issue, since this is a non-critical issue, and since we are limited in our possibilities to do something about it, we have decided to leave it as it is. If the spacecraft's downlink is off when over our groundstation, we will command it back on. Our expectation is that this does not occur when the spacecraft is in transponder mode, so once we switch it to that mode, it should be fine.
4. The TX distortion issue has turned out to be a separate issue (contrary to our earlier assumptions, it is not related to the dropouts), related to the behaviour of the (battery-less) power system. This is also non-critical, and has shown to solve itself after the spacecraft has rotated a bit more.
73 on behalf of the Delfi-C3 team,
Wouter Jan Ubbels PE4WJ