I noticed that during the last period of documented efforts to recover AO-40 4 years ago, there were promising results about hearing faint signals. By my interpretation of those old reports, they basically confirmed that the command receiver was working but could not get much else done with it. Now that it has been officially silent for several years, has anyone tried to send commands to it in order to disconnect the (shorted) battery banks via the relays onboard? Given the changing sun-angles on the arrays and the passage of time, as well as possible heating of certain onboard components due to the constant supply of solar power to the shorted batteries, could there be any possibility of (energizing) the battery-disconnect relays? I presume that they are in a fail-close arrangement, because if they were fail-open, they should have already done-so due to the shunted power system. Also, could the solar panels have fuses that have opened? could such fuses be re-settable?
I would be interested to hear what knowledge there exists about the present status of AO-40, especially what "google" couldn't fetch.
Auke de Jong VE6PWN DO33go Edmonton, AB