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Another Amateur Radio Satellite
k4hg writes "Remember the US Naval Academy satellite with the measuring tape antennas?
Well, not only is it still alive after nearly four years in orbit (be sure to read the 2001 Slashdot articles to see who was right and wrong about it working at all!), but the latest satellite to come out of the same lab, called PCSat2, was installed Wednesday on the International Space Station. It is bolted to the space station on the P6 truss, but is otherwise independent, only benefiting from the high mass to drag ratio of the ISS to prolong orbital life. The satellite is alive and transmitting on amateur radio frequencies, I could hear it on a marginal elevation in the Florida Keys. When it come in range of a ground station with better coverage, the data will be viewable here in real time. This new system is in addition to the amateur radio station already operational on the ISS.
And yes, they used tape measure antennas again, you could see them deploy on Nasa TV!"
please move along
In my race to be first I didn't know what else to say.
A radio signal coming from space! I think today is the day that scholar's will look back at and say that the world was never the same.
Not only does this satellite transmit Amateur Radio waves, it measures the stars! :)
Fallout 3 will suck.
it's true, they made homo movies back in the 1950's
Now I know how "normal" people feel when I start talking about code.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The thing may be cheap to build, but you can not just throw it up there like a kite, it needs a rocket to get it into orbit. the price does not reflect this cost.
To Hell with the Queen of England!
It's nice to see a well-written, informative, researched article submission for once. Half the crap that makes the front page looks like it could have been copied off the back of a short bus. Keep them coming, man.
Is there a type of elevation in the florida Keys _other_ than marginal?
/*sarcasm*/
Marginal elevation: Elevation due to a stick of margarine. The low cholesterol alternative to butteral elevation.
Read about me and my killer below . .
When Sen. Ted Kennedy was merely just another Democrat bloating on Capitol Hill on behalf of liberal causes, it was perhaps excusable to ignore his deplorable past.
But now that he's become a leading Republican attack dog, positioning himself as Washington's leading arbiter of truth and integrity, the days for such indulgence are now over.
It's time for the GOP to stand up and remind America why this chief spokesman had to abandon his own presidential bid in 1980 - time to say the words Mary Jo Kopechne out loud.
As is often the case, Republicans have deluded themselves into thinking that most Americans already know the story of how this "Conscience of the Democratic Party" left Miss Kopechne behind to die in the waters underneath the Edgartown Bridge in July 1969, after a night of drinking and partying with the young blonde campaign worker. But most Americans under 40 have never heard that story, or details of how Kennedy swam to safety, then tried to get his cousin Joe Garghan to say he was behind the wheel.
Those young voters don't know how Miss Kopechne, trapped inside Kennedy's Oldsmobile, gasped for air until she finally died, while the Democrats' leading Iraq war critic rushed back to his compound to formulate the best alibi he could think of.
Neither does Generation X know how Kennedy was thrown out of Harvard on his ear 15 years earlier -- for paying a fellow student to take his Spanish final. Or why the US Army denied him a commission because he cheated on tests.
As they listen to the Democrats' "Liberal Lion" accuse President Bush of "telling lie after lie after lie" to get America to go to war in Iraq, young voters don't know about that notorious 1991 Easter weekend in Palm Beach, when Uncle Teddy rounded up his nephews for a night on the town, an evening that ended with one of them credibly accused of rape.
It's time for Republicans to state unabashedly that they will no longer "go along with the gag" when it comes to Uncle Ted's rants about deception and moral turpitude inside the Bush White House.
And if the Republicans don't, let's do it ourselves by passing this forgotten disgrace around the Internet to wake up memories of what a fraud and fake Teddy really is.
The Democratic Party should be ashamed to have the national disgrace from Massachusetts as their spokesman.
Please pray for our Troops fighting for us. God Bless you All!
A school science experiment in the form of an amateur radio satellite. Shuttle to deliver it, ISS to 'hold it up', finally, the pair of them actually doing something useful....
02:11:26:12 : W3ADO-1]BEACON,SGATE,qAo,N1GAU-15:T#014,066,058,05 8,087,213,11111111,0001,1
Enlighten me, please...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
OK, I'm not a ham but I have a couple of scanners. My question is, how can I eavesdrop on the ISS and/or STS shuttle missions? Some web searching has led to 145.8000 and 146.6550 as the ISS and STS audio downlinks, respectively; however, monitoring them even when ISS is over North America doesn't get me anything.
Are there other interesting frequencies, or does the ISS/STS have to be "exactly overhead" in order to pick up on their transmissions? I presume that if Houston is able to pick them up, I should be able to, also; but I'm not a radio engineer. I'm in west Tennessee and haven't been able to locate any repeaters of the ISS/STS frequencies anywhere nearby.
Any help out there?
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Shouldn't that "Yet Another Amateur Radio Satellite"?
Did someone miss a chance to add "Yet" to derive a "Yet Another Names Starting With Yet"
where did my sig go? where's my sig at?
Yes the satellite is still operational, too bad the website isn't :)
But, frankly, it seems the history of science in LEO is pretty poor. Aside from using LEO as a convenient spot to look down upon the Earth or up at the stars, that is...
Can any Slashdotters make a convincing case that science on the ISS is a vaguely good use of funds? In the sense of "the scientific payoff is likely worth it in the first place", not "well, we've spent $100 billion now, we may as well spend the remaining $10 billion".
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Those were made from measuring tapes, right?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This is another example of slashdot's editors not doing a good job of reviewing submitted text. Anti-slash.org has a message board detailing some of their silliest abuses. Check it out!
more s7able want them there. The most. Look at conversations where your own towel in thing for the
King County sheriff's detectives are investigating the owners of an Enumclaw-area farm after a Seattle man died from injuries sustained while having sex with a horse boarded on the property.
Investigators first learned of the farm after the man died at Enumclaw Community Hospital July 2. The county Medical Examiner's Office ruled that the death was accidental and the result of having sex with a horse.
A surveillance camera picked up the license plate of the car that dropped the man off at the hospital, which led detectives to the farm and other people involved, said sheriff's Sgt. John Urquhart.
Deputies don't believe a crime occurred because bestiality is not illegal in Washington state and the horse was uninjured, said Urquhart.
But because investigators found chickens, goats and sheep on the property, they are looking into whether animal cruelty -- which is a crime -- was committed by having sex with these smaller, weaker animals, he said.
The farm was talked about in Internet chat rooms as a destination for people looking to have sex with livestock, he said.
"A significant number of people, we believe, have likely visited this farm," said Urquhart.
The Humane Society of the United States intends to use the case during the next state legislative session as an example of why sex with animals should be outlawed in Washington, said Bob Reder, a Humane Society regional director in Seattle.
"This and a few other cases that we have will allow us a platform to talk about sex abuse of animals," Reder said.
Thirty-three states ban sex with animals, he said.
Susan Michaels, co-founder of local animal-rights organization Pasado's Safe Haven, said she has been fighting to have bestiality made illegal. "It's animal cruelty behind closed doors," Michaels said.
I've been watching the shuttle mission on the K6BEN amateur TV repeater near San Jose, which is on 421.25Mhz, the same as cable (not broadcast) channel 57, through my VCR and with a Yagi I made from a magazine article. The NASA Ames Amateur Radio Club is providing the feed with a 1.2GHz uplink to the repeater. They also have shuttle audio on two meters, and I can receive that with my VX-2R HT.
only benefiting from the high mass to drag ratio of the ISS to prolong orbital life.
Err.. and the fact that visiting cargo ships occasionally give the ISS orbit a boost.
If they keep doing that every couple of years, the ISS orbit will never have a chance to critically decay and will be up there forever.
There's supposedly no SPAM.
this is not realy new, as it was first used on the AMSAT P3-B (aka OSCAR-10) spacecraft. Because there was not enough room inside the SPELDA adaptor, the 2m (145 MHz)antennas were folded. Once the S/C was separated, they automatically deployed.. Measuring tape was the easiest and cheapest to use, and it worked perfect..
PCSat2 .Info page (with images)
You can kind of see it mounted on the ISS.
I'm a 2000 man.
Is it Imperial or Metric?
Because I'm in Europe, and need to know if I'll be able to listen in.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
hitching a ride on someone elses rocket is free you dorkwad
Not to pan amateur radio (I wish I had my license) but why the excitement about hearing a signal from a couple hundred miles away? If that guy in Key West had a chat with another amateur in, say, Pensacola, that would be routine.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Amateur Radio satellite? Is that like Sirius or XM only not-for-profit?
The very first amateur radio satelite, OSCAR-I used tape antennas back in 1961. The antennas were made out of steel measuring tapes because they could be folded back against the satelite during launch and would spring into position as the satelite separated from the rocket. The tapes are 1/4 wavelength long, which at 2 meters (145 mhz) is about 19" long. Most satelites operate at higher frequencies, though the amateur 10 meter band at 28mhz is also available for satelite use. You do the math to see how long those antennas would be....(75/frequency in mhz = length in meters for a 1/4 wave antenna)
You'll have to wait for the dupe.
I think I hear it approaching now...
When we designed the SPARTAN Packet Radio Experiment, we designed and used a microstrip antenna (aka patch antenna) for VHF communications. It makes a lot more sense for a space payload to use patch antennas rather than anything that sticks out of the side of the spacecraft.
Here is a good wideband VHF/UHF microstrip antenna example.
If you need a JPole here's the place to get one
02:03:26:43 : KC9XG]APRS,PCSAT2*,qAC,KC9XG:] IGNORE ALogger A side test digi packet
02:03:26:44 : PCSAT2]APRLTM,SGATE,qAO,KC9XG:T# IGNORE ALogger A side test packet
???
Profit!
bush fucks monkeys
its because he is one
dont bless our troops, they are all brainwashed monkeys too!
OO OO OO AH AH AH OO O O OO AH AHA Haaa
eheheheheee
Grandparents Wife!
actually theres a really large trash heap you can get some elevation on.
they have an interesting way of getting rid of trash here. they compress it and pile it up and then throw dirt over the top of it. it creates these MASSIVE pretty green hills as the natural tendency of any field or pile of dirt is to sprout grass.
my coworker here refers to the big one in south of miami in cutler ridge as 'mount trashmore'
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
The fact that it's a couple hundred miles up is what makes it different. Sure, getting a signal from Pensacola to Key West wouldn't be a big deal today, because you can retransmit the signal via repeaters located up and down the peninsula. (Or use HF, which is a completely different technical challenge, but is pretty well understood.)
Imagine trying to get a signal from Key West to a point equally far away, but without any repeaters or being able to use longer frequencies for the HF advantage -- that's more like what space communications are like. It's a whole new ball game.
Furthermore, there's just something different when it comes to being in space at all. Even if there weren't the technical challenges involved, it would still be interesting to do, because it's just fascinating to be directly involved with something that's orbiting the earth. I understand that might not ring everyone's bells exactly, but for some of us it's a pretty attractive draw.
Asking 'what's the big deal, it's only a few hundred miles' is kind of like asking someone who's going on a submarine down to the Titanic: 'what's the big deal, it's only three miles...'
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."