New satellites: Soyuz launch with UWE-4, ZACUBE 2, D-Star One, etc

A Russian Soyuz will launch Kanopus-V 5 & 6 into Sun synchronous orbit. Also onboard are a few cubesats, see here and here.

An approximate TLE for the planned orbit, assuming the launch occurs at the scheduled time of 2018-12-27T02:07:00, is the following:

1 74001U 18861A   18361.08819444  .00000000  00000-0  50000-4 0    05
2 74001  97.7200 266.0000 0001436   0.0000  35.0000 14.94155472    07
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Three satellites and their transmitters have been added into db with temporary norad ids:

99950 - D-Star ONE Sparrow
IARU Frequency coordination: http://www.amsatuk.me.uk/iaru/finished_detail.php?serialnum=582
Although this coordination happened for the the D-Star ONE Phoenix, not sure if there was any update for D-Star ONE Sparrow that is not published in IARU site.
The frequencies that will be used are the same, more at http://www.d-star.one/.

99951 - UWE-4
IARU Frequency coordination: http://www.amsatuk.me.uk/iaru/finished_detail.php?serialnum=627
One of the most complete pages and descriptions of cubesat satellites, http://www7.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/forschung/space-exploration/projects/uwe-4/.

99952 - ZACUBE-2
IARU Frequency coordination: http://www.amsatuk.me.uk/iaru/finished_detail.php?serialnum=204
The coordination was agreed 7.5 years ago, so I’m not sure if the transmitter frequencies are still valid. Also transmitters details were based on this page http://www.cput.ac.za/blogs/fsati/zacube-2/ which says that the last update was in 2016.

There is also D-Star ONE iSat according to space.skyrocket.de but I didn’t manage to find any info about it.

I’m going to add the TLE above to all of them and schedule observations.

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Observations are scheduled!

Streaming (starts at 1:00 UTC, launch at 2:04 UTC) of the launch is available at:
http://online.roscosmos.ru/

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We’re about 12 hours after launch and can conclude the following:

  1. D-Star One is active on 435.700MHz. Both Sparrow and iSat are transmitting at this frequency (source). Best TLE is 43879.
  2. UWE-4 is transmitting at 437.385MHz, but the signal seems to use a very wide bandwidth.
  3. ZACUBE-2 should be transmitting at 437.345MHz but has not yet been seen.
  4. An unknown transmitter is active on 437.060MHz, best described by TLE 43897.
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LUME-1 was also on this launch. Looking at a tweet from them, I think we might have found our mystery sat: https://twitter.com/GuillermoLN/status/1078230051139846148
(If you squint, you can just about read the frequency on the GQRX display).

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According to this tweet zacube-2 uses commercial frequencies, so I’ve disabled all the transmitters of it in db.

So that’s a thing.

Using ikhnos some results:

LUME-1: 43908 (used this for network) or 43907
UWE-4: 43879-43890 (used 43882 for network)
D-Star One Sparrow: 43879-43890 (used 43885 for network)

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26 cubesats

Non co-ordinated LUME-1(at 437.060MHz) interferes with Tanusha-3 (AFSK1k2 at 437.050MHz):

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Seems Tanusha-3 isnt co-ordinated either http://www.dk3wn.info/p/?page_id=29535

Actually many Sats we have seem to not be co-ordinated

After some calculations here are my latest assignments of norad ids (accuracy percentage in parenthesis):

LUME-1: 43907 or 43908 (selected for network)
UWE-4: 43880 (almost sure need confirmation from calculations with more accuracy)
D-stars → depending who is who… not sure without decoding:
D-Star ONE Sparrow: 43879 (selected for network) or 43881
D-Star ONE iSat: 43879 or 43881(selected for network)

Indeed thanks for mentioning it. In the same frequency there are a couple more satellites. Let’s check in the future if we are going to have interference.