Information Week published news of the Merritt Island High School team who developed StangSat.
The fourth round of selections in NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative also included a team of high school students at the Merritt Island High School in Brevard County, Florida. They plan to build a cubesat containing two accelerometers to measure the amount of vibration in the Poly Picosatellite Orbital Deployer, or P-POD case that holds the cubesats during launch and then deploys them.
Congratulations to Hector Martinez, CO6CBF and Joe Murphy, EI5EV for completing the first satellite contact between Cuba and Ireland on April 3, 2013 on FO-29.
The distance between CO6CBF and EI5EV is 6955.1 km. Both stations had a 66 second window within the FO-29 footprint. Hector wrote, “Doppler is always in play. We did the calculations based on the great feature implemented on SatPC32 V12.8b using the option of seeing the frequency you are at the satellite receiver. This was our common reference point. I was very satisfied when I heard Joe exactly on the frequency I was expecting!”
ARRL UHF/Microwave Band Plan Committee Chairman, Rick Roderick, K5UR reports that the draft documents of the 5 and 10 GHz band plans have been released for review.
The Committee, charted by the ARRL Board of Directors, has prepared draft band plans for 5 centimeters (5.650-5.925 GHz) and 3 centimeters (10-10.500 GHz).
Amateur Satellite allocations in the draft band plans include:
The band plan committee is requesting user comments via e-mail to [email protected] by April 30, 2013.
The ARRL Band Plan announcement, including links to the PDF copies of the proposed band plan documents is available on the ARRL Web.
Jim Tittsler ZL2IA/AI8A/7J1AJH has posted photos of New Zealand’s KiwiSAT at the 2013 Auckland Technology Convention hosted by the Auckland VHF Group. Fred ZL1BYP and Ian ZL1AOX brought the satellite in its “clean cabinet” to the convention so that the audience would have a chance to see it. Ian had brought along his station (and dummy loads) and demonstrated commanding the satellite and collecting telemetry.
KiwiSAT will carry both amateur radio communications including linear and FM transponders; and a scientific experiment for small satellite attitude control The mission also carries a special beacon which will be used by radio amateurs around the world to collect data for environmental monitoring. KiwiSAT development is completed ready for launch into a LEO orbit with a target launch date in mid 2013. The project is funded by radio amateurs through personal and club donations, and by membership ofAMSAT-ZL. Donations may be made via a link to PayPal on this page.