Tomorrow, July 13, 2018, nine new CubeSats will be deployed from the ISS. It will be great to get them into the db so we can start tracking them. I’m particularly interested in MemSat as it is from my friends at Rowan University, but I’m sure others are interested in EnduroSat AD, built by the Bulgarian Federation of Radio Amateurs (BFRA).
Masa JN1GKZ reports JAXA has announced that nine CubeSats will deploy from the International Space Station on Friday, July 13.
The nine CubeSats are RainCube, Radix, CubeRRT, HaloSat, TEMPEST-D, EnduroSat AD, EQUISat, MemSat and RadSat-g.
EnduroSat AD, EQUISat and MemSat will operate in the amateur bands. The IARU Amateur Satellite Frequency Coordination Status pages show these frequencies:
• EnduroSat AD 437.050MHz CW, GFSK 9k6
• EQUISat 435.550MHz CW, FSK 9k6
• MemSat 437.350MHz BPSK 9k6
It says that it will be deployed at 10:42 AM EST! which means 14:42 UTC. According to a recent news post and some tweets, they said that deployment will be at 14:20 UTC.
As tomorrow we have two events an ARISS Contact from 13:55 - 14:15 UTC and the deployment I would like to ask four things:
Please don’t schedule any observation of the new cubesats before 14:20 as these cubesats will start transmit 45min after deployment and also because we probably want to use stations for the ARISS Contact.
If you don’t have a strong preference about one of those three cubesats please try to schedule all of them equally. If you are not sure which one you should schedule, don’t worry observation team will schedule them for you.
On two of them there are two transmitters one CW and one with other modulation. I suggest you schedule the non CW.
Please avoid as much as you can to schedule ISS passes after the deployment in order to have time for the new deployments.
Thanks for setting this up - I had been searching for a deployment time but you found it!
I see all three in the network, but I’m not able to schedule any of them - I keep getting a message “No Ground Station available for this observation window.” When I search for observations for ISS, I see one 14:05 to 14:16 which should cover the ARISS contact, but that is it.
I’m pretty new to scheduling, so perhaps I’m making a mistake, or there might be already observations scheduled.
Maybe someone could take a look and schedule some observations after 14:20 UTC.
Fingers crossed all new sats have a successful deployment!
@KU2Y what is the window you try to schedule the satellites?
Unfortunately ARISS contact is covered only by 2 stations in west and center North America and the deployed satellites will go over some satnogs stations ~90min after their deployment, around 15:40UTC. The next pass over a satnogs station looks like to be at ~19:50 UTC.
(thanks to gpredict time controler for give a chance to take a look in the future )
@KU2Y welcome to satnogs! Feel free to ask if you have any question or if you need any help, here or in matrix/irc.
You can always do manual observation with gqrx or similar programs and get in one waterfall at least two of them. Alternatively you can build a couple more satnogs stations for the next deployment.
I am now able to schedule ISS observations over the next few days, but not MEMSAT or ENDUROSAT or EQUiSAT - they all give an immediate error “No ground station available for this window” regardless of the time period. I notice that under Transmitter, there is no TLE listed - perhaps this is the problem? When I try to schedule ISS, when I select the transmitter, for example Tanusha FM, under it says “Using TLE 999 issued 10 hours, 12 minutes ago”.
Do we have to wait until TLE are issued for these three new sats before any observations can be scheduled?
@KU2Y you are right, my bad… I thought that during the sync with db, network would also get TLE but it didn’t. I have added them and now you can schedule them.
There is something for MEMSAT at SatNOGS Network - Observation 181660 but I’m not sure if it is MEMSAT or something else. I guess the next observations will show.
@fredy I saw that off-center signal as well, but it hasn’t shown up on any other observation. This morning, when the ISS came over me, I tuned my SDR so that I could receive the frequencies of all three CubeSats - EnduroSat, EQUiSat, and MemSat. I copied some telemetry from the other two, but there was radio silence for the whole pass around the MemSat frequency.
I’m not sure what to do but keep scheduling passes. Maybe they can send a command to reset it or reboot it, but it doesn’t look good right now.
)
