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Oscar-40 Ham Satellite Transmitting Again
Bruce Perens K6BP writes: "The Phase 3-D Amateur satellite, called "Oscar 40" now that it is in orbit, is back on the air. A ground station sent a reset command and a command to turn on a microwave transmitter, which worked on the first attempt. The transmitter is sending an unmodulated carrier until telemetry software is reloaded, but it's clear from the doppler shift of the signal and the loss-of-signal time as the transmitter crosses the horizon that the signal is coming from the satellite's orbit. The ground controller will now reload the flight computer software and bootstrap the main flight computer. It will take a while to reload both computers and to investigate problems with the satellite, as this is complicated by the attitude and orbit of the satellite - right now it's not actively stabilized and is only pointing the antennas toward the Earth during part of its orbit, and of course it's only above the horizon from any ground controller's perspective during part of each orbit." Read on for a bit more on this promising news."
"A board of inquiry will convene to investigate the loss-of-signal incident and to change procedures to avoid another such incident with this or a future Amateur satellite. General information about the satellite can be found at www.amsat.org. The following announcement is from www.amsat-dl.org:
The Santa Claus brought AO40 back On Air! At 2000-12-25 21:45 command station Ian, ZL1AOX sent a RESET command through L-band and an initialization block to switch the S2 S-Band transmitter On. Just after the first attempt the S2 beacon came on 2401.305 MHz, Signal was about S5 to 6 which was comparable to when S2 was heard last during testing The S2 beacon produced a steady signal and from the doppler wobbling it is also clear that it is in fact coming from AO-40. Ian ZL1AOX reported that he was able to copy and observe (with Spectrogram) the S2 beacon. His LOS time was 2000-12-26 03:45:15. Predicted LOS from NORAD set #12 keps gave 5 secs later. Approx distance was 61,470 Kms. Today, 2000-12-26 at about 16:05 UTC, ZL1AOX will acquire AO-40 shortly after perigee with a reasonably good squint angle. He will than start reloading the IPS software. Until than the beacon will not carry any telemetry, just a carrier. Once the bootloader for IPS is up, you will see "X" blocks in the telemetry until IPS is completely loaded... (Thanks to DB2OS for this information)."
I mean, who controls it? A corp? Open Source Satellite or something?
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
very very good news.. alot of time, money (a little of mine,) and hard work went into the sat. Does it strike anyone as funny that a bunch of hams can get this kind of stuff to work but nasa looses probe after probe after probe ?
-neil
"Now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
I have been waiting for "Phase III" to be operational for years. My heart sank when I heard that it "died" when it reached orbit. Maybe they will have this thing up and going by Dayton 2001 :)
--fatboy
The HAM (Amateur radio) community. Has a long history of building its own satellites. They are put in orbit by NASA on rockets that are being tested. Many of these satellites have been lost to launch problems.
There is a lot of similarity between the Hacker and the HAM communities in fact some of the first networking code in LINUX is the amateur packet radio code.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Yes it is a corp, the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation. See http://www.amsat.org
--fatboy
The most important thing about this is the common man getting something into space. Space needs to be available to everyone, not just Governments and corporations. If this attempt had failed miserably, it would have had a similar effect to Challenger, I believe. People would have frozen on the idea of trying to launch another, and they'd sure as hell use it as precident if a person wanted to go to space...
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I looked on the amsat site and can't find anything clearly stating what the point is-- is it just to be cool, ie like a deluxe model airplane, or does it have some special mission, purpose, or function?
I wonder-- will Ariane 5 use anything as ballast? If I wanna send a ham sandwich into space (to be cool) would they do it?
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
It was obvious from the beginning, the satellite it's a bad boy and doesn't have any consideration to earth's orders. He doesn't want to boot, he'd prefer tenniss', going to a higher orbit? Common on... it's warmer here...
Last days satellites are so respectful as the old ones. AI brought them to an undesirable stage...
--ricardo
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
whew! I was afraid that we'd have to send up four old men into space to stabilize it and hope they don't find the nukes!
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
As a side question: What was the reasoning behind making the bootloader only turn the carrier on? We decided to make ASUSat1 transmit sensor readings after booting from the ROM. We never got in contact with it long enough to transmit new software, but two other hams received telemetry packets which they forwarded to us. This provided invaluable information when we were trying to figure out what went wrong.
Was the bootloader made as minimal as possible to make software verification easier?
The fact is that guns kill people efficiently. Knives kill people, blunt objects kill people, guns are just more efficient.
But here is the deal, it is not the tool it is the society. Until we have a society that rasies all people to value all forms of human life, these incidents are going to keep repeating themselves. Happy Holidays and a merry Children Get Gifts Day!!!
There are a ton of reasons, but the main one is education. First, anyone with a ham license can use these satellites. They are actually very easy to use and it does not require large antenna arrays consisting of 20 foot dishes or millions of dollars of equipment to use them. I have talked through the birds using only a small off the shelf handie talkie and a mobile antenna - total cost for all the equipment was about $500.
These are not just "things slopped together". A whole hell of a lot of engineering goes into them, and there really is not much of a difference between the hamsats and the ones put up by megacorp. They have Earth locators on them. Some sats, like WO-18 had video cameras. Other sats like DO-17 had voice encoders (which did not work for some reason) but would orbit and send down telemetry. Even though you could not use DO-17 for communcation, it was probably the most awesome of the hamsats at the time. I was able to listen to it go overhead without even having an antenna on the receiver, and was able to decode the telemetry packets when I put a rubber duckie antenna on the thing.
Check out the amsat.org web site some more. There are links to things like the University of Surrey satellites and the aformentioned WO-18 made by Weber University.
73 DE NV0U
Except that when you go nuts with a knife you may kill one person or two before you're disarmed but not bloody seven! Explain to me please how this guy would have managed to kill seven people had he not been able to obtain a semiautomatic gun?
Those of us in the amateur radio satellite community have gone for a hell of a ride over the last few weeks, and it's good to see things looking up a little. (Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk)
73 de Maggie KB3DXS, ARRL 39280, AMSAT 32844
-=Maggie Leber=-
Or something
Rich
firat of all, you are off topic.
second, you need to replace the word efficiently with easy. A sword can kill you just as efficiently as a gun(more so in some cases), but you have to have skill. the skill needed to use a gun is almost 0. Thats why its called "The Great Equallizer" A 90 year old woman can defend herself from a 6'9" muscle bound assailant.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I hear they used to be a recruitment firm. Obviously, personnel misunderstood when told they needed a headhunter.
Rich
I am pro humor however and my previous post awas a joke.
Rich
The right to bear arms is a cornerstone of the political foundation of the USA. He does not need an "excuse"
Rich
Rich
... that Dr. Evil doesn't go trying to snag any of its parts for any evil hacking projects..
;)
(and yes, one can perform evil hacks.. Just ask Bill Gates.. Parlaying a buggy and unoriginal OS into a multi-billion-dollar company qualifies as both a huge hack and amazingly evil.. Just imagine: if Bill Gates can do that much with windows, what Dr. Evil could do with a StrongARM CPU and a FORTH interpreter
"Wow honey, that looks like a giant pair of.."
Your Working Boy,
Rich
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
So that there is little-to-nothing that can fail in the event of a reboot. This is firmware that *MUST* be as close to 100% reliable as humanly possible. There's no opportunity to flash new code into rom, after all. It simply has to be able to bring the satellite into a known safe state capable of responding to ground commands.
Once the satellite is in a known "safe" state, more capable software can be uplaoded into the flight computer. Which is what the controllers are doing.
As far as I know, most amateur satellites have followed this approach since at least AO-10. I know the microsat design does based on my experience with AO-27 and (peripherally) with IO-26. And yes, the ROMs on AO-27 were horribly expensive.
KA1LM
I prefer mine with ketchup
But the point the previous poster was making was wrong as you say. Those acts required some serious planning and intent. On the other hand, a gun is not necessary to perform this kind of thing. Just look at comparable incidents in UK: The guy who went mad in a church with a sword, the guy with the machete in the infant school. And even with guns under much heavier control, Michael Ryan in Hungerford (sorry, I don't recall the fatality figures).
But in the end anyway, gund were designed into the American political system. As part of the designed mecahnism, you can't just take them out without upsetting the whole thing. So the only reasonable way to get rid of guns would be to sump the whole constitution. And that would require revolution. And that would likely require... guns.
Rich
Rich
I heard on NPR that there were rumors of imminent layoffs at Edgewater. Management denied these rumors, of course. Well, that's probably true, since they just reduced the headcount today...
dit-dittee-dit-dit-deet dept, wtf?
the dah-dit-dah-dit-dah-dah-dit-dah dept makes much more sense.
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
can someone please moderate down all these off topic posts?
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
DOVE (7K)
DOVE-OSCAR-17 telemetry decoding program for Linux. Outputs to screen or text file. Pre-compiled in a.out format. Includes a man page. Written by John A. Magliacane, KD2BD.
KEPGEN (18K)
Simple program to generate 2-line element sets from keyboard input. Pre-compiled in a.out format. Includes a man page. Written by John A. Magliacane, KD2BD.
Microsat Groundstation for Linux (121K)
A complete suite of groundstation software for operation on the Pacsats. Requires Linux with the AX.25 protocol package from Alan Cox, GW4PTW, added to the kernel. Includes source code but no executables. This version has been converted to use the Athena Widgets by Jonathan, G4KLX. The original programs were written by John Melton, G0ORX/N6LYT.
PB and PG for Linux (39K)
A complete suite of groundstation software for operation on the Pacsats. Includes features for unattended operation, such as automatic upload and download requests and persistent requests for directory fills. Requires Linux kernel version 2.0.24 or higher and the AX.25 protocol package. Runs in text mode (no X Window System required) under ncurses. Includes source code but no executables. Written by Bent Bagger, OZ6BL, Peter Scott Bentsen, OZ2ABA, and others, based on XPB and XPG by John Melton, G0ORX/N6LYT.
PREDICT Version 2.1.1 (264K)
PREDICT is an easy to use, ncurses-based satellite tracking/orbital prediction program developed for the Linux operating system. It allows users to track satellites in earth orbit in real-time, or make orbital predictions in advance of their approach. A unique voice mode allows azimuth and elevation headings of a satellite to be articulated to a ground-based observer through a soundcard in real-time to aid in locating and identifying satellites through optical means. PREDICT also tracks positions of the Sun and Moon, and provides Doppler shift and path loss calculations for analyzing radio communication paths between satellites and earth-based ground stations. PREDICT can export real-time tracking data to client programs using UDP socket-based connections. PREDICT requires ncurses version 4.2 or higher and the Linux pthreads library. PREDICT was written by John A. Magliacane, KD2BD. Further information is available at the PREDICT Home Page.
SatTrack 3.1.5 (558K)
Real-time orbit simulation program with color graphics displays for Unix and Linux systems running X11R5. Controls antennas and radios. Also features a batch mode for prediction of passes over specified ground stations. Includes source code in C. Written by Manfred Bester, W6/DL5KR.
UO11 (11K)
UoSAT-OSCAR-11 telemetry decoding program for Linux. Outputs to screen or text file. Pre-compiled in a.out format. Includes a man page. Written by John A. Magliacane, KD2BD."
--- Also there is: "Source Code
These files contain source code applicable to a variety of computers. Be sure to also scan the other listings for the word "source", since many of the computer-specific programs come with source code that can be adapted to other computers.
2LIN2KEP (43K)
Converts a file of NASA-format 2-line Keplerian element sets into AMSAT verbose format. Includes BASIC source and an .EXE file for IBM PC. Written by Richard W. L. Limebear, G3RWL.
Selecting Orbits (5K)
BASIC listings associated with the article "Selecting Orbits for Radio Amateur Satellite Missions" by Martin Davidoff, K2UBC. Article appeared in the Proceedings of the 6th AMSAT-UK Colloquium (1991) and in Satellite Operator, February 1995.
N3EMO's Satellite Tracking Program (32K)
Satellite tracking in C by N3EMO.
Moon Tracking (4K)
Prints azimuth and elevation for the Moon at fixed intervals. Source code in BASIC for the IBM PC. Originally written by WB7CCI (now W7GJ). This version by Richard W. L. Limebear, G3RWL. TRACKER is an updated version by the original author (executable form only).
Satellite Education News Tracker (17K)
Command-line tracking program in C. Fixed for Y2K (+bugs) by Paul Williamson, KB5MU.
SatTrack 3.1.5 (558K)
Real-time orbit simulation program with color graphics displays for Unix and Linux systems running X11R5. Controls antennas and radios. Also features a batch mode for prediction of passes over specified ground stations. Includes source code in C. Written by Manfred Bester, W6/DL5KR.
PREDICT Version 2.1.1 (264K)
PREDICT is an easy to use, ncurses-based satellite tracking/orbital prediction program developed for the Linux operating system. It allows users to track satellites in earth orbit in real-time, or make orbital predictions in advance of their approach. A unique voice mode allows azimuth and elevation headings of a satellite to be articulated to a ground-based observer through a soundcard in real-time to aid in locating and identifying satellites through optical means. PREDICT also tracks positions of the Sun and Moon, and provides Doppler shift and path loss calculations for analyzing radio communication paths between satellites and earth-based ground stations. PREDICT can export real-time tracking data to client programs using UDP socket-based connections. PREDICT requires ncurses version 4.2 or higher and the Linux pthreads library. PREDICT was written by John A. Magliacane, D2BD. Further information is available at the PREDICT Home Page.
STP: Simple Tracking Program (137K)
Simple tracking program run from the command line. Computes AOS/LOS tables, tables or realtime text displays of satellites, the Sun, and the Moon, and reads NASA format Keplerian element files. Includes source code in C for PC or UNIX. See also these additional files (52K). Written by Christie Harper, KD4QIO.
Caution: this program has problems with Year 2000 dates, and the author no longer provides support.
Microsat Groundstation for Linux (121K)
A complete suite of groundstation software for operation on the Pacsats. Requires Linux with the AX.25 protocol package from Alan Cox, GW4PTW, added to the kernel. Includes source code but no executables. This version has been converted to use the Athena Widgets by Jonathan, G4KLX. The original programs were written by John Melton, G0ORX/N6LYT.
PB and PG for Linux (41K)
A complete suite of groundstation software for operation on the Pacsats. Includes features for unattended operation, such as automatic upload and download requests and persistent requests for directory fills. Requires Linux kernel version 2.0.24 or higher and the AX.25 protocol package. Runs in text mode (no X Window System required) under ncurses. Includes source code but no executables. Written by Bent Bagger, OZ6BL, Peter Scott Bentsen, OZ2ABA, and others, based on XPB and XPG by John Melton, G0ORX/N6LYT.
WPRAIRIE 2.1 (166K)
Station control program for use with WinOrbit 2.2 or later on Windows 3.1 or 95 (but not Windows NT). Controls rotors through a Prairie Digital board or a custom serial port controller. Tunes radios (FT-736R, Kenwood, up/down buttons) through serial or parallel ports or the Prairie Digital board. Receives information from WinOrbit via DDE. Alpha test software, with Visual BASIC source code included. Written by Carl Gregory, K8CG. See also PLAN-13 from the collection of articles by G3RUH. It includes source code in BASIC, with lots of explanation."
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By the way, for those who ask (in essence): Why bother with amateur satelites?
I'd just like to suggest that it's no different than the Open Source movement, in one way:
It's a good way for people with genuine interest to get into the field by getting their hands dirty and trying to make contributions.
What better way to learn about just about anything, i.e. besides building one and/or working with it?
Still not convinced? So, go ask Linus why he built/worked with Linux 0.x ;)