Its not much, but better than nothing. At least that is what I keep telling myself.
Monthly Archives: February 2008
ANDE DEORBIT
Recently Henk PA3GUO and Mike DK3WN sponsored an ANDE award to encourage reception of telemetry during the last few weeks of life of the Amateur Radio satellite ANDE.
ANDE was build by students from the US Naval Academy and deployed from the Space Shuttle (STS-116) on a return mission from the International Space Station (ISS) on 21 December 2006. Due to it’s low orbit it had a short lifetime and re-entered the earth’s atmosphere just over a year later on 25 December 2007.
It operated an APRS AX25 packet digipeater on 145.825 MHz as well as a Voice Synthesizer and other communications experiments.
The ANDE award was awarded to anyone who made QSOs via ANDE or received telemetry during its final 10 days in space.
Along with many others, I had my home station listening for packets from this oversized golfball in order to gather telemetry. As I was travelling most of the 10 days prior to ANDE’s re-entry, I was unable to make any QSOs through it, but managed to receive enough telemetry to qualify for the award.
PB/PG 2.2.1 Released
From Bent Bagger, OZ6BL:
—
I’m happy to announce release 2.2.1 of PB/PG for Linux.
PB and PG for Linux are programs used for download from and upload to
digital satellites (Pacsats) supporting the FTL0 protocol. This
software allows you to directly communicate with the Microsat series
of satellites. It provides a Curses (Ncurses) based user interface. It
features automatic directory fill requests and simple, rules based
file download requests.
This release serves two purposes:
1) To show that the project is still alive and kicking
2) To correct a number of small ‘inconveniencec’ and to add a few new
features. These changes/additions are described in the document
‘ReleaseNotes’ q.v. (included in the release)
PB/PG for Linux may be downloaded (in source form only) from one of
these places:
– http://www.fern.dk/pgpg/pbpg-2.2.1.tar.gz
– http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/ham/pbpg-2.2.1.tar.gz
– ftp://ftp.amsat.org/amsat/software/Linux/pbpg-2.2.1.tar.gz
I may be contacted using this address: oz6bl (at) amsat (dot) org
Happy hamming
Best 73 de Bent/OZ6BL
—
I submitted some rather simple patches to the package including IPv6 patches to allow it communicate to a server running predict (which has also been patched for IPv6 support), which were included, then I helped test them with my home station. Even though I’m only using a vertical antenna, I was able to upload to and download from the satellite quite successfully on most passes. It’s kinda cool actually, not something one does every day 🙂