Hello All,
I wanted to give a quick update on CAPE-3, and where we are in mission goals. However, first I'd like to thank everyone who has taken part in helping track CAPE-3 and gather data for us to analyze the state of the satellite in orbit. Without the wonderful support of the community, we might be still trying to capture enough information to determine our status.
So from all reports, it seems CAPE-3 is indeed healthy in orbit. Our power system seems to be working as intended and UHF transmitters seem healthy. However, we're suspecting the VHF radio is dead on arrival. We've not seen any indication of it functioning in orbit, which aligns with a fear we had prior to integration.
Using this information, our team is now devising plans to begin testing individual subsystems on the satellite to gauge the health of those. This might take a few more weeks to validate and provide an update on what capabilities we can still carry out, as we update our ground systems.
As reported in DK3WN's blog: https://www.satblog.info/new-cape-3-beacons/ we have seen reports of CAPE-3 attempting to email home with health data. However we have come across two issues with the APRS services our satellite performs (email and tweeting).
1.) Our satellite from what we can tell only has a functional UHF radio, and is able to transmit the packet correctly. However, we don't believe CAPE-3 will find many iGates listening on UHF frequencies to gate packets for it. If there are any operators out there with iGates I'd like to humbly request help in setting up a few UHF iGate stations in different areas to help gate our packets back into the APRS.
2.) We are not able to validate the email packets will reliably come out once every hour and half as we initially believed. Due to the way we designed the satellite, the APRS functions will be transmitted on whichever radio our satellite thinks is active. At current, CAPE-3 thinks it has a functional UHF and VHF, so there will most likely be many failed attempts made on VHF. We're hoping to gather enough data from email packet timestamps to figure out a new frequency of when email UHF packets will be sent out.
Once we're further in our testing and verification phase, we'll make attempts to shut down the VHF radio on the satellite to improve reliability of these functions.
Note these two functions are supported by custom software we're using to check APRS-IS feeds for our packets to email and tweet out. I'm planning to make a release of information to allow the community to test out this server, and am hoping to make that information public by this weekend. I'm running a few tests to make sure things still work as intended on the ground end in my free time in the evenings after work.
So if anyone is able to switch their iGates, or make a UHF iGate to help track CAPE-3 email packets, we'd be really grateful for the help! We've turned on one at our University as well.
Thanks all, I apologize if this email was wordy, but I felt it necessary to be fully transparent on what we're planning to do to help you help us with our mission goals. :)
73
Sincerely, Rizwan Merchant KF5BNL