Following the Kicksat-2

[Janos Tolgyesi]

Hi,
we changed the setup on our ground station,s larger antenna, (4.5 m parabola) to follow the Kicksat-2.  It will follow the orbit of the satellite based on the TLE in the new-tle file. You can see the schedule on the table. We are in Budapest, the time is local time in the table (UT+1).
http://152.66.73.245:33333/
Near the ground station antenna, (sometimes) running the test of our more or-less ready Smog-type pocketcube small satellite. You can hear the telemetry of it from the lab. Picture of them here:
https://twitter.com/AlbaOrbital/status/1090004488910446593
best:
t.janos

[Julian Priest]

Hi all,

got this weak handheld last night on the current published Kicksat2 TLE
with gqrx. Right time and place at least. (TWOi bookmark at 437.240)

#AOS, LOS, Dur, Max El, AOS Az, LOS Az
2019-02-16 16:49:36 UTC 00:08:08 15.6 249.70 16.84
#Freq
437.378.300 Mhz
#TLE
KICKSAT-2
1 44046U 18092G 19045.94744287 .00120033 16388-4 39486-3 0 9994
2 44046 51.6372 249.3636 0006931 307.8262 52.2132 15.90295128 225
#Lat/Long
-41.3333 174.80000

http://julianpriest.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/GQRX_2019-02-16_23-49-11.png

cheers

/julian

http://julianpriest.org | jul...@greenbench.org | +64 211 808 626
Thomas King Observatory, 40 Salamanca Road, Wellington 6012, NZ

[Andy Thomas]

Don't see any doppler on your display?

andy

[Janos Tolgyesi]

Mike, DK3WN received signal, but he said, it is very weak:
http://www.dk3wn.info/p/?p=93475
http://www.dk3wn.info/p/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/kicksat2_spectrum_17022019.jpg
It is not clear (for me) wich is the frequency on it.
t.janos

[Andy Thomas]

My interpreation of Mike's chart is :

The top axis is increasing time in units of 6 or 7 seconds. The brightest line is a satellite with AOS (acquisition of signal) at 11:26 and 18+ seconds, with very fast doppler (forming a curve against the vertical axis, frequency) until 11:27 and 47 seconds - you can see the rate of frequency change is levelling off, so I think that must be the satellite's TCA (time of closest approach) at his location. I have a hunch that Mike got the azimuth spot on within his antenna beamwidth and the satellite "flew" at him, rising in elevation.

This fast and short change suggests that Mike is only hearing the satellite when it is just about and then absolutely on top of him. I would think that the distance between the top and middle of the chart is about 3 Khz and the centre of the chart would be the nominal frequency.

The remainder of the chart would show it falling down in frequency but would have required the antenna to turn very quickly, and quite possibly by the time he did that the satellite signal had gone.

andy g0sfj

[Alexei Colin]

Hello Janos,

Thanks for pointing your antenna at KickSat-2. WebSDR appears to be too
limited for listening for Sprites. As far as I can tell, WebSDR does
not make it easy to extract the raw stream on the client side, it only
gives access to the audio waveform. Also, I think we need the full 64kHz
bandwidth, but WebSDR streams only up to 30009Hz to the client.

Since creating a streaming system would be too complicated, Would you be
able to record raw I/Q traces at 437240Hz, 64kHz wide during a good pass
in the next few days?

-alexei

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[Mike Rupprecht]

The KICKSAT-2 beacon interval is currently 1 minute. The signal is weak but I heard two (undecodable but  better looking) beacons today. 

TLE #44046 - 0.5 days old

73 Mike

DK3WN

[Janos Tolgyesi]

Alexei,
you are right, the websdr not a good source to get decodable signal.
We use it to explore, or hunting some satellite signals, and inform our community, for example about the status of our more-or-less ready pocketcube sats.
If appeared valuable signal from Sprites, we will start to record it in I/Q format.
best:
t.janos hg5apz

[Janos Tolgyesi]

My question is: are there any automatic, watchdog-based Sprite deployement, as was the case at Kicksat-1, or is it access only through a ground station command?
I havenot any good overview of the flight software, some times ago I tried to study the new codes, (I made an overview that time:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/kicksat-gs/watchdog%7Csort:date/kicksat-gs/ywX5pKPuDXI/TzYgGGieBQAJ ), but it is not shure, the code in the repo is the same, as the actual flying version.
In the demo/test version there are 4 options to burn the 2 different antenna and 2 other to deploy the Sprites:
https://github.com/kicksat/FlightSoftware/blob/master/KickSat-2/libraries/burn/Examples/burn_test/burn_test.ino
I dont see, how it works on the flying version.
We know, the first burn process wasnot successful, the antenna didnot open yet.
t.janos

[Zac Manchester]

There is no automatic deployment (this was not allowed). Deployment must be commanded from a ground station.

- Zac

[Janos Tolgyesi]

Thank you the quick replay....

[Andy Thomas]

VK2FAK advises: " I hear that it has been decoded using  the UZ7HO  HS-Soundmodem

Manchester 1200bd."

andy