In July 2020 AMSAT Italy and the School of Aerospace Engineering (SIA) of the University "La Sapienza" in Rome, represented respectively by Dr. Emanuele D'Andria and Dr. Paolo Teofilatto, signed an agreement to collaborate in a synergic way to achieve common objectives including the development of satellites and the study of related disciplines in the space field.
And it is within this agreement that was born the collaboration for the development of the *STECCO* satellite, acronym for Space Travelling Egg-Controlled Catadioptric Object. The satellite aims to test an innovative attitude control device and at the same time to implement an amateur radio digipeater. The repeater will be always active simultaneously with the other functions of the satellite. *STECCO* will operate both in uplink and downlink at the frequency of 435.800 Mhz, 9600 baud FSK modulation, G3RUH coding, AX.25 protocol. Beacon and telemetry info are available on the project web site [1]
*STECCO* will be launched together with other satellites on March 20, 2021 at 6:07 am GMT from the Bajkonur cosmodrome, Kazakistan, on a Soyuz-2 rocket, in heliosynchronous orbit. Preliminary TLEs calculated on the estimated launch parameters are available on the same project web site. [1]
The amateur radio community is also invited to share the satellite telemetry sending the data to the AMSAT Italia secretariat [segreteria] at [ amsat.it].
IARU coordination info are available at http://www.amsatuk.me.uk/iaru/formal_detail.php?serialnum=782
[1] https://sites.google.com/uniroma1.it/stecco-sia/radio-amateurs?authuser=0