At our development meeting last Thursday night one of the discussed items were the uplink frequencies of the original PACSAT.

Curiosity over the weekend lead to a bit of online research that produced a few QST articles from the time period revealing details on the original PACSAT.

PACSAT was AO-16 launched 33 years ago on January 22, 1990 along with an almost twin LUSAT (OSCAR-19) built by AMSAT Argentina.

They were launched into sun synchronous orbit from the ESA facility in French Guiana with an altitude of 800km. 

Both were a new generation of Microsats measuring 230x230x213mm.

AO-16 received on 2-meters at 145.9, 145.92, 145.94 and 145.96 mhz and transmitted on 437.050 with 4 watts maximum.

LUSAT received on 2-meters at 145.84, 145.86, 145.88 and 145.90 mhz and transmitted on 437.125 with 4 watts maximum with a backup transmitter at 437.150.

The frequencies vary by article probably reflecting changing configurations and the above were taken from a post launch article.

Power output was variable by command and on 70cm achieved 65% efficiency.

Uplink was FM, 1200 BPS Manchester encoded FSK and downlink was 1200 bps RC-BPSK SSB.

Storage space was 4mb RAM.

Interestingly, one QST article it list the designers of the command module and one call is familiar, N5BRG.  All questions are now to you Bob!

73

Jim McCullers

WA4CWI