In a message dated 28/11/2010 08:11:17 GMT Standard Time, pa3guo@upcmail.nl writes:

One of the conclusions in the reports: a 12 element antenna works just fine ! Did anyone do a similar experiment and has interesting feedback to share ?

-- Henk, PA3GUO

Hello Henk.

You are doing a great job with tracking these new birds and relaying audio on the internet. The one that looks really interesting is the NASA solar sail cubesat. From what I read, nanosail-d will be ejected from a pod within its host spacecraft anytime now. The telemetry from that experiment will only last 12 days as it is powered by batteries. The rate of decay due to the sail will be huge. 70 -120 days from 650km.

However, the problem for all of these new sats is a lack of TLEs on spacetrack. We stand virtually no chance of tracking nanosail D with its large decay rate if keps are not updated on a very regular basis. For whatever reason NORAD (or whoever) have decided not to make them publically available and going to 5 or so individual sites to download keps isn't really viable. It's a shame because the students are not going to receive anywhere near as much data as they normally would. Pity their professors could not lobby to release the keps as normal. - Probably just one individual needs a 'kick' in the right place.

Perhaps AMSAT needs to begin developing a method of generating its own keps from AOS / LOS TCA times or perhaps if the satellite has a transponder, from info from ranging experiments. Now, there's a nice project. Imagine a box attached to your radio that has a display in km ! How cool would that be.

73

David