OSCAR-11 REPORT

15 February 2007

TELEMETRY & NEWS ARCHIVES

I have now uploaded an archive of the telemetry for 2006 to my website. The zip package contains 86 individual telemetry files. The names of the files are date coded, and there are accurate date/time stamps within the data. I have also uploaded an archive of all these reports for 2006, as a single file. www.users.zetnet.co.uk/clivew/

TELEMETRY AND REPORTS WANTED!

To investigate the on-board clock's hour problem, mentioned below, I would welcome some telemetry from differents parts of the world, at times when the orbits do not pass over the UK. These times are approximately from 10:00 to 16:00 and from 19:00 to 04:00 UTC. If you don't have a decoder, I can now accept short WAV files of good audio, duration up to 30 seconds.

I would also like reports of reception around the times of expected beacon switch ON and OFF. No telemetry wanted, just when you listen, and whether you heard, or didn't hear the bird. Please e-mail to the address below.

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During the period 23 January to 14 February 2007, the satellite was heard from 28 January to 08 February. Good steady signals have beeen heard on most passes, and good copy of the telemetry obtained.

The on-board clock has maintained accurate time. Over the reporting period, no change could be detected! However the hour counter sometimes shows an error of of 10 hours, ie. in its most significent digit. The 'day of the week' counter operates reliably, zero representing Thursday.

The date counter appears to be incrementing correctly, but the day of the month is not reset to one, at the end of each month. On 07 February it reset to 41, showing that the unused bit representing 40 permanently is stuck at a one. This means that the clock error is now 37.21453 days slow.

If the satellite's watchdog timer continues to operate normally, the beacon should switch ON around 18/19 February 2007. The satellite is in full sunlight at the present time, and will remain in this state until mid-April 2007, when eclipses start again.

I am indebted to David G8OQW, Mark KU7Z, Jay KD4QoV, Etienne ZS6Y, Jeff KB2M and Geoff ZL6GA for their reports. Many thanks.

The current status of the satellite, is that all the analogue telemetry channels, 0 to 59 are zero, ie they have failed. The status channels 60 to 67 are still working. The spacecraft computer and active attitude control system have switched OFF, ie. the satellite' attitude is controlled only by the passive gravity boom gradient, and the satellite is free to spin at any speed. When telemetry was last received it showed that one of the solar arrays had failed, and there was a large unexplained current drain on the main 14 volt bus. After 22 years in orbit the battery has undergone around 100,000 partial charge/discharge cycles, and observations suggest that it cannot power the satellite during eclipses, or sometimes during periods of poor solar attitude.

The watchdog timer now operates on a 20 day cycle. The ON/OFF times have tended to be very consistent. The average of many observations show this to be 20.7 days, ie. 10.3 days ON followed by 10.4 days OFF. However, poor solar attitude may result may result in a low 14 volt line supply, which may cause the beacon to switch OFF prematurely, and reset the watchdog timer cycle. When this occurs, the beacon is OFF for 20.7 days.

The Beacon frequencies are -

VHF 145.826 MHz. AFSK FM ASCII Telemetry

UHF 435.025 MHz. OFF

S-band 2401.5 MHz. OFF

Listeners to OSCAR-11 may be interested in visiting my website. If you need to know what OSCAR-11 should sound like, there is a short audio clip for you to hear. The website contains an archive of news & telemetry data. It also contains details about using a soundcard or hardware demodulators for data capture. There is software for capturing data, and decoding ASCII telemetry. The URL is www.users.zetnet.co.uk/clivew/

If you place this bulletin on a terrestrial packet network, please use the bulletin identifier $BID:U2RPT130.CWV, to prevent duplication.

73 Clive G3CWV xxxxx@amsat.org (please replace xxxxx by g3cwv)