The CAMSAT XW-3 (CAS-9) amateur radio satellite will be launched at UTC 03:11:31 on 2021-12-26 , and will be deployed at 98.858° east longitude and 28.413° north latitude at UTC 03:35:58, location close to Western Australia.
Radio amateurs will receive CW beacon and GMSK telemetry signals approximately 38 seconds after the satellite is separated from the launch vehicle, and then the linear transponder will be put into use after approximately 49 seconds.
CAMSAT XW-3(CAS-9) satellite has been installed on the CZ-4C Y39 launch vehicle at the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in China, and related work is in progress as planned.
If all goes well, the satellite will be launched on December 26, 2021 03:11:31 UTC, it is piggybacked on the rocket with governmental primary payload ZY-1(02E) earth resources satellite. The orbit will be a circular sun-synchronous orbit with an altitude of 770.1 kilometers and an inclination of 98.58 degrees, the running cycle is 100.14 minutes.
Attached is the user’s manual of XW-3 (CAS-9) satellite for radio amateur.
Several station have also received it since then on both CW and GMSK frequencies. The GMSK signal seems to be drifted ~4KHz, for example in observation 5201271. I’m going to add this drift in DB.
Low elevation pass was part of my problem, but was not able to decode the 4k8 telemetry packets as there was strong CW on the ‘right’ edge of the downlink w/ the same doppler track. Does anyone know what object that is from?
That’s interesting… wondering now if the extra signal at the right is the GMSK signal or the CW you observed in observation 5201271 and some others.
Given that it was the only amateur satellite on this launch, I guess the signal should be from the satellite but we don’t expect something on that frequency.
EDIT: I’ll keep watching it as there are some GMSK observations in the next minutes.
After a better look I decided to revert the drift I added in the GMSK trasmitter in DB. It seems that something else going on, so until we find out I’ll keep the initial frequency for the GMSK transmitter.
Well, got my first ‘live’ decode on the 0350utc pass (27-Dec-2021) over the U.S., but not easy with the strong CW back alongside the stream of packets. Can’t tell from this picture but at times the signal strength of the CW was more than double the magnitude of the 4k8 packets.
