I’ve been phished… ineptly
Did I catch a ‘manny’ in there?
CubeSat Ground Station
Some questions are out of left field. Then there’s this…
Dear Mr. Joseph Swanson,
My name is Marco Gomez and I am project manager of a CubeSat project that is being developed in Costa Rica. We are currently working on the ground station design, among other things, and are thinking whether to use an omnidirectional antenna for the ground station. Our plan is to use a similar setup as to what is described in the paper attached to this email about the MEROPE ground station. It consists of an M2 eggbeater antenna and a Kenwood TS-2000 radio working on UHF for uplink and downlink (we are using a half-duplex system). Additionally, the spacecraft will be launched from the ISS, so we are assuming a 400 km altitude circular orbit for our analysis.
I am contacting you because I read that you worked on the ground station design and wanted to know if this setup worked. Any comments about the design and operations will be appreciated. Thank you for your time.
Best regards,
Ing. Marco Gómez Jenkins
Irazú Project Manager
Asociación Centroamericana de Aeronáutica y del Espacio (ACAE)
+506 7058 3848
http://www.acae-ca.org/
… so naturally
Hey Marco,
I haven’t attempted satellite communications for roughly 15 years, but presumably the MEROPE ground station setup would still be a viable option for CubeSat tracking. The antenna technology is probably the same, so ensure you pair an excellent radio (Kenwoods were great around 2000) with whichever tracking software you employ.
The CubeSat I did the research for blew the hell up over Kazakhstan in 2006… I had graduated and was no longer working for SSEL. I hope your payload finds orbit.
Good luck…Joe
Hope they make it.. if the ISS ends up in pieces over Kazakhstan like the Dnepr carrying MEROPE, we’ve got some bigger fish to fry. I tracked down a link to an article to find out when this was… turns out the flight was delayed five years. Ouch.
Just This Thing
Zelda 3D
Majora’s Mask. Check.
Fall Wallboard
The Fall Wallboard at work is coming along nicely…
Not a Popsicle
Cheese sticks, while delicious, are not popsicles.
Not a popsicle.
Cubs WC
Need more views…go Cubs
Step One
From now on, this is step one:
There were tens of steps before that step in the actual Shark hand-vac fix-it effort, but it really should have been step one. For this post, let’s call it step n.
This was step n+1, which led to me assigning ‘whip out the multimeter’ as the new step one…
Yep. Didn’t need to do this step:
Didn’t need to do any steps < n actually. Just step n, which is now step one.
In summation, pull out your multimeter. The Shark works great, and can suck 20V and an Amp from any of the humidifier power sources scattered amongst the house. The power supply was borked, and I was maybe a bit too excited to crack something open than to debug properly. But anyway, we have designated step one, which is noteworthy.
Wheelin’
…been doing some wheelin’
…wheelin’ around my assistant…
…wheelin’ some junk to the junk store…
Gaming
Been doing a little gaming…
