AMICal Sat is a student satellite dedicated to space weather purpose. It will monitor the auroral oval almost during each orbit. In details, it will take pictures of the aurora once at the limb to allow to get the vertical structures of the oval, once at the nadir the map the portion of the oval seen by the satellite .
Scientifically the data will be used to reconstruct the flux of particles coming into the atmosphere especially the electrons in the range of 20eV-10keV. Read more ...
The 6 June amicalsat will transmit a picture above Europe, US and Asia.
Here is when a transmission will start :
First CW is transmitted during one second, and then the frames follow. The RTC onboard is not very accurate due to high temperature change, allow up to two minutes drift on the time given. (because this is a planned task in the satellite)
The transmission will occur on the S-band coordinated frequency : 2415.300 MHz Due to temperature and hardware limitation the frequency might be a little lower.
For help, and reports please contact us.
Happy receiving !
We are planning an amateur radio S-Band weekend the 5-6 june 2021, with several transmissions of pictures from the satellite. This will give more opportunity to amateur radio to have fun receiving S-band transmission from the satellite.
We are planning transmissions over Europe, America, Asia. We might adjust this if the onboard battery is too low. S-band transmission needs a good amount of energy.
Keep in mind that the frequency transmission might have a small offset up or down on each transmission and you will need to compensate it manually.
To easily receive the pictures, you will find a software pack with the needed tools to receive the pictures in the download menu. You will need an SDR receiver, gnuradio 3.8 and python.
A sample recording is also provided to test your setup. The recording is a full pass using a 3m dish.
The payload works very well. We just received the first picture from AmicalSat, see the tweet from CSUG.
The picture is not totally clear because we had to transmit it without compression to allow the packed loss caused by the bad aiming of the S-band antenna.
The commissioning of the satellite is progressing. We have a big software problem with the ADCS, because of this we cannot change the attitude of the satellite to aim S-band antenna to earth. This causes us difficulties on the S-band transmissions. We are investigating optimisation in the transmission to improve the reliability of the link even if the SNR is low. We are still working with Satrevolution to bring the ADCS back.
Amicalsat was successfully launched, everything is nominal. We will start commissioning soon. We will keep you updated about it.
AmicalSat will be launched the 1 september 1h51 am UTC from Kourou, French Guinea. The launch vehicle will be a Vega rocket.
The TLE :
1 74001U 20500A 20246.14839410 .00000000 00000-0 50000-4 0 05 2 74001 97.4424 319.0247 0002779 53.5911 328.5572 15.10021350 09