Got up this morning, checked my mheard list and saw an entry I hadn’t seen before for FAST2. Checked my logfiles and I found this (output from listen -t -a):

1200mk: fm FAST2 to BEACON ctl UI pid=F0(Text) len 123 08:20:33
0000  F21001633 38263.461363903952.94 -3773326.54 +4430538.23    +0.00
0040  000    +0.00000    +0.00000+1332283286 016 013 004 006 031.


Wow, I wasn’t expecting a full beacon from one of the two FASTRAC satellites, sure, I recently started listening for them, but still, this was a bit unexpected given that I only have an omni-directional antenna, cool though.  Now what does it actually mean?

Well, FAST2 is the Amateur Radio callsign for FASTRAC 2 or “Emma” as the satellite is nicknamed.  For the rest, I decided to be lazy, Mike, DK3WN has quite a few telemetry decoder programs written, so I downloaded the one for FASTRAC, put it onto a VM, cleaned up my logfile entry a bit and we get.

More detail on what this means is available here. I was wondering about the date and saw this on their facebook page.

The GPS receiver on Emma has not failed, since separation we have had a harder time of commanding her (can do so at very high elevations for a short time) so at the moment one of the microcontrollers that generates part of the beacon… message needs to be reset, which is why the message shows old information. We are in the process of upgrading our groundstation so that we can more easily command Emma and make sure we can reset that microcontroller.

Thanks for your interest and collaboration,

The FASTRAC Team

By the looks of it, the Atmel AVR is still stuck. Hopefully the command team can get it sorted.