To all Cubesat designers on the bb,
I find it very hard and difficult to track and find the cubesat beacons. The reason is they are transmitting short packets once every 2 or 5 minutes. I was thinking on a simple solution to this problem. Why not running the beacons with continues wave on very low power? Say 2 ~ 4 milliwatt or so. On a packet burst the beacon can switch on high power, but in between its switching back to low power cw. This way its not doing to much on the cubesats power budget and it would easy to track.
This idea is already been tested succesfull. The last few months we are doing tests with the 4 milliwatt 216.980MHz beacon on RAFT. Signals received on a 10 el yagi are very good. I could track the raft milliwatt beacon back to 3 degrees above the horizon with realtime dsp. On my webpage are the results of these experiments: http://www.pe1itr.com/satellite/raft.htm
Maybe this idea could be used in de next cubesat launch?
73 Rob PE1ITR http://www.pe1itr.com