Funcube-1, now known as AO-73, was launched early this morning (about 2:10 AM EST). I heard a pass around lunchtime, but wasn’t setup to decode it yet. Even without decoding anything, it was a valuable experience, as it proved the signal level was quite strong, and it enabled me to come up with a better estimate of the actual beacon frequency by averaging the AOS and LOS frequencies. My estimate was 145.935.250.
After dinner, I downloaded the necessary software, located the TLE file, and had my IC-9100 setup with HRD running it in RX mode to Doppler correct the beacon based on my earlier estimate of the beacon frequency. Within moments of the predicted AOS, I was hearing the distinctive beep every 5 seconds between packets. Over the next 12 minutes I was then in decode heaven (9:15 PM to 9:27 PM EST – 0215 to 0227 UTC).
Using the Funcube Dashboard I was able to fully decode 47 frames. The signal peaked around S4 a few minutes either side of apogee, but was still decoding with no movement on the S-meter well beyond that. The final telemetry frame is shown below.
You can see the data uploads I made in the “FUNCube Data Warehouse”. More frames would have decoded were it not for a rather strong spur that happened to pop into the passband as the satellite was dropping back down toward the horizon and Doppler was shifting the receive frequency down. I think the decoder captured the spur.
