AMSAT NEWS SERVICE ANS-337
The AMSAT News Service bulletins are a free, weekly news and infor- mation service of AMSAT North America, The Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation. ANS publishes news related to Amateur Radio in Space including reports on the activities of a worldwide group of Amateur Radio operators who share an active interest in designing, building, launching and communicating through analog and digital Amateur Radio satellites.
The news feed on http://www.amsat.org publishes news of Amateur Radio in Space as soon as our volunteers can post it.
Please send any amateur satellite news or reports to: ans-editor at amsat.org.
In this edition:
* ISS Global Testing SSTV December 5-6 Prior to MAI-75 Over Moscow * Soyuz Launch Anomaly Results in Loss of D-Star ONE Cubesat * AMSAT-SM Supports ARISS With New Donationn * IARU Frequency Coordination for China's Juvenile 3U Cubesats * Satellite Shorts From All Over
SB SAT @ AMSAT $ANS-337.01 ANS-337 AMSAT News Service Weekly Bulletins
AMSAT News Service Bulletin 337.01 From AMSAT HQ KENSINGTON, MD. DATE December 3, 2017 To All RADIO AMATEURS BID: $ANS-337.01
ISS Global Testing SSTV December 5-6 Prior to MAI-75 Over Moscow
http://ariss-sstv.blogspot.com/ published an update to the December MAI-75 SSTV testing schedule:
**UPDATE - Nov 28** Seems the system will be put through some extended testing from December 5 starting around 15:00 UTC and running until 09:00 UTC on December 6. Test images will be used during this period. This will provide near global coverage if all works well.
The MAI-75 schedule over Moscow remains unchanged at this point. The times correlate to a small number of passes each day in range of Moscow.
Dec 6, 2017 Setup and power on – 13:40-14:20 UTC Power off – 17:05-17:15 UTC
Dec 7, 2017 Power on – 13:45-13:55 UTC Power off – 17:30-17:40 UTC
Dec 8, 2017 Power on – 14:05-14:15 UTC
Power off and stow – 17:00-17:10 UTC
[ANS thanks ARISS for the above information]
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Soyuz Launch Anomaly Results in Loss of D-Star ONE Cubesat
A new Russian weather observatory and the first prototype for Telesat’s planned network of 100-plus broadband communications satellites in low Earth orbit were among 19 spacecraft lost after a Fregat rocket stage ran into trouble soon after liftoff aboard a Soyuz booster Tuesday.
The Fregat rocket pack was supposed to place the 19 satellites into four different orbits Tuesday in a four-hour flight sequence following launch on a Soyuz rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, a new spaceport in the Amur region of Russia’s Far East.
A report published by Russia’s Interfax news agency Tuesday quoted a Russian space industry source who attributed the apparent failure to human error. The source said a mistake uploaded to the Fregat’s flight computer caused the upper stage to be in the wrong orientation for the main engine’s first burn, which was scheduled to last 77 seconds to reach a temporary parking orbit a few hundred miles above Earth.
Billed as the first German commercial CubeSat, the D-Star One spacecraft had four communications modules on-board, two of which were to be used by the amateur radio community. Developed by German Orbital Systems in Berlin in cooperation with the Czech company iSky Technology, officials hope to build follow-on satellites to construct a low Earth orbit communications network.
[ANS thanks SpaceFlightNow for the above information
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AMSAT-SM Supports ARISS With New Donation
AMSAT-SM is proud to announce a donation to ARISS (via AMSAT-NA) of $285. We hope that this small donation will help ARISS further work with amateur radio from ISS.
AMSAT-SM is the Swedish section of AMSAT with approximately 220 members. One of their objectives is to inform Swedish hams about the fun with amateur satellites! Not many SM hams are active via satellite at the moment. With the help from our Swedish webpage and HF-net we hope that more Swedish hams should be using amateur satellites. The AMSAT-SM annual meeting is held every spring. Some weeks on Sundays we have a HF-net on 80 meters with lots of news about satellites and space.
[ANS thanks AMSAT-SM for the above information]
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IARU Frequency Coordination for China's Juvenile 3U Cubesats
The IARU Amateur Satellite Frequency Coordination Status pages, hosted by AMSAT-UK as a service to the world wide Amateur Satel- lite Community, report on an updated coordination for the Juvenile project from China.
Juvenile is a 3U CubeSat project led by China Soong Ching Ling Youth Science and Culture Center for school education and amateur radio.
The amateur radio station onboard will provide telecommand, tele- metry and FM repeater functions:
1. A VHF uplink and UHF downlink data control board with loop back function, which can act as an FM repeater.
2. A VHF uplink and UHF downlink 9k6 BPSK data control back up board, with a trigger to take a photo from a camera, and transmit SSTV image through NBFM modulation.
3. A 2.4 GHz band with 2 MHZ bandwidth multiple frequency up and down link communication experiment.
Planning a launch from Jiuquan Space Center into a 500km Sun Synchronous Orbit.
The IARU reports a November 30 revised coordination has been provided.
Frequency coordination for Juvenile 1B, 1D and 1F Uplink 435.290 MHz FM Downlink 145.840 MHz FM Telemetry 145.930 MHz 9K6 BPSK
Frequency coordination for Juvenile 1A, 1C, 1E and 1G Uplink 145.965 MHz FM Downlink 436.250 MHz FM Telemetry 437.475 MHz 9K6 BPSK
Source: http://www.amsat.org.uk/iaru/ (frequencies which have been coordinated)
[ANS thanks the IARU for the above information]
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Satellite Shorts From All Over
+ GALAPAGOS ISLANDS, HC8. A group of operators are QRV as HC8LUT from San Cristobal Island, IOTA SA-004, until December 8. Activity is on 160 to 10 meters using all modes and satellites. QSL via IK2DUW. (via ARLD048 DX News)
+ Year-Long NASA On The Air Event Kicks off on December 11 The Amateur Radio clubs at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) centers around the US have invited the Amateur Radio community to join the NASA On The Air (NOTA) special event. NOTA gets under way in December 2017 and continues through December 2018. https://nasaontheair.wordpress.com/
+ Astronaut Joe Acaba made an historic contact with the Maria Montessori Institute Educational Unit in San Cristobal, Venezuela: the first-ever educational ham radio contact in that country’s history. Video posted at: https://twitter.com/ISS_Research/status/935901182811238400 (via ARISS)
+ Hackaday article shows how AMSAT teamed up with students from Rochester Institute of Technology to create a Maximum Power Point Tracker, attached to a Fox-1B CubeSat. https://hackaday.com/2017/11/27/amsat-mppt-goes-to-infinity-and-beyond/
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73, This week's ANS Editor, Lee McLamb, KT4TZ kt4tz at amsat dot org