Thanks everyone!

Here is the question. Did anyone ever happen to hear anything on 435.350 during the last week that did *not* correlate with PSAT? It may have been BRICSAT in full sun! Its PSK31 trasnponder is on the same downlink... and since its only problem was poor power budget, it may have been alive and no one was listening?

It all started Friday afternoon, when I happened to tune to PSAT and heard only about 10 seconds at the tail end of a pass and saw about a 5 second swoosh before the transponder dropped out. Giving me a complete guess at maybe 12 RPM.

KO6TZ reported: a screen capture from Spectran of the "swoosh" fade lines from the 23:30utc pass of NO-84. The tick marks … are 1 second spacing… [with] just slightly over 5 secs between the fades. That puts the spin at ~11.7 RPM.

And of course DK3WN nailed it with this high res plot: http://www.dk3wn.info/p/?p=76608 Showing 5 rotations in 32 seconds or about 9.4 RPM

We had to use this signal strength method since the the telemetry spin data is of no practical use since it is undersampled. IE, we are only sampling at once every 5 seconds and so this is HALF the Nyquist rate. To capture a spin of 12 RPM we would need to sample over 24 times a minute. So that is why we needed people to simply listen for it and determine the spin that way.

And it looks like today is the last day of full sun.

We had gotten excited when we noticed this full sun late Friday afternoon and realized it would be a good time to listen for BRICSAT which also has an HF PSK31 downlink on 435.350. But we noticed that after 20 months in space, that BRICSAT has separated enough that it ended its full sun period the day before.

Then we went and looked and noticed this full sun period for both satellites was only 5 days long anyway. We are embarrassed that we have not been watching the orbit and looking for these full sun periods. They may be rare indeed.

Bob