One Year Tomorrow!

As of last night, we are still operating and I was able to get good, strong signal.  I had a little scare the other day but I found out my rotor/antenna array decided to randomly take off in the wrong direction instead of following computer control.  About a minute later, just as I was about to try to run them manually (which requires a third arm during a pass) the rotor motors snapped back into reality and tracked appropriately.  The quality part of a pass can be as short as a few minutes, so you really don't want to be waiting 2 minutes for your rotor/antennas to spin around.  Luckily they came into tracking right as the pass was coming to culmination.  I collected beacon data and several echoes. 

Tomorrow (2014-11-19) marks one year from launch and over 5000 orbits of the little cube.  Batteries still seem strong and orbit is high, so we'll see how long we can keep going!

Pictures from 2014-08-03 roll

Using the time determined previously, I was able to predict where pictures were taken allowing better correlation and identification of the location when the pictures were snapped.  We have positive ID on the Solomon Islands and Percival Lakes pictures.

I have been attempting to get the Kenwood TH-D7A to send to the satellite using an "eggbeater" antenna, but have been unsuccessful so far.  The first tries were my fault due to misconfiguration, but I have tried at least 3 times with the correct configuration so I don't know why it isn't working, other than my latitude is a little far North for ideal "eggbeater" pattern.  I also need to check the antenna tuning and radio output power.

IMU data from the 2014-08-03 "roll" seems null but I put it and BATT data in the archives anyway.

Here's the best pictures from the roll: