These cubesats are launched into a ~5900 km circular orbit at 70.16 deg orbit, so will provide for interesting tracking requirements, as they’ll be above the horizon for a long time.
Just a quick heads-up, as we discussed this in satnogs matrix channel, there is a potential issue with the duration of the observations for tracking these satellites. We have some long (~1h) observations from stations in Network but we are not sure if RPi will be able to perform them, with the most significant issue to be the size of the generated artifacts(audio and waterfall).
For this reason a solution that can be implemented is to split observation to smaller ones, for example splitting 1h observation to 4 of 15min, back to back observations. I’m going to work on implementing this functionality in the next days in order to be tested and ready for the launch.
For this specific use case, you already need to manually configure the IQ storage file location, add an external USB disk drive and write the IQ data to that location.
ENABLE_IQ_DUMP="True"
IQ_DUMP_FILENAME="<USB disk location>/iq-file.raw"
If Fredy can consider how IQ files will be handled when he implements the split observation feature, anyone using the wiki instructions for IQ recording would benefit.
Just to be clear, I’m not going to change anything in client side, the whole implementation will be on Network and as a work around for not having long duration observations. About IQ for those who have them enabled is one more case that this split of a long observations is needed.
Also in Network there have been deployed changes that allow splitting long observations, like the ones expected for these satellites, to shorter ones. The default observation duration for splitting is 12min with a default 1min period between observations. These values can be changed in the advanced options in the scheduling page. If you spot anything unusual during scheduling let me know in a new thread or by opening an issue in satnogs-network repo.
The satellites will be available for scheduling at least 1h before launch.
However the launch is postponed for 1h, so we will need to generate new TLE set.
Also in DB there have been added two more satellites, ALPHA and TRISAT-R that have been declined coordination by IARU as non-amateur missions, however they both seem that will transmit in radio amateur frequencies. The new list for this launch:
by using both TLE sets by @cgbsat (vega-c payload) and @iu0sia(astrobio) we can see that closer to the deployment location is the one @cgbsat produced, so we are going to use that set, of course by updating it to the right launch time:
