RamSat, the 2U CubeSat built by the students at Robertsville Middle School in Oak Ridge, Tennessee is predicted to de-orbit by the middle of next week. We are asking all SatNogs stations to work to capture as many telemetry transmissions as possible during this period. With almost 45,000 frames of data collected, and over 87% success rate, the response from the SatNogs community has been overwhelming. Many thanks in advance for your efforts in this final push for a successful project. David Andrews, N1ESK
I’ll try to systematically schedule observations for passes with high max elevation (>60 degrees). As reaching the re-entry the TLE will become faster and faster deprecated, is the satellite transmitting also its position?
If yes then maybe we can reach pretty close to re-entry, as we did with BOBCAT-1 by receiving it ~1-3min before re-entry at ~100km.
2 Likes
Is there any chance that RamSat will also be more active over Europe and other continents.
1 Like
@N1ESK If RAMSAT’s remaining days are earmarked for sending beacon messages only, would it be possible to increase the rate of beacon messages? Not sure what you power budget situation is.
This would be useful in the final days/hours when we need to generate a custom TLE (using STRF) as the space-track TLEs become rapidly out of date due to the decreasing altitude.
The more beacon data points we have to work with, the longer we can potentially keep our antennas pointed accurately at RAMSAT to hopefully be able to do what @fredy pointed out – tracking RAMSAT as long as possible.
Also curious for your response to @PE0SAT 's inquiry about activity over Europe.
3 Likes
We cannot control the orbit of course, but are looking into decreasing the beacon interval. David Andrews, N1ESK, RamSat ground control
4 Likes
Update from the software genius (Peter Thornton): we cannot increase the rate of the beacons. I wish we could. Perhaps a design feature for RamSat 2. Thanks for everyone helping out as we are now less than 100 hours from end of life.
4 Likes
Not with that attitude (pun intended) you can’t! Just command it to’ pull up’! 
Joking aside, My stations (MAUSyagi) will be tasked with as many observations as possible until RAMSAT comes home.
Thanks for checking, it’s probably for the best you cannot. Introducing a change at this point in the lifecycle could risk getting any not data back at all if something goes sideways with the C&C sequence.
Scott (MAUSyagi)
2 Likes