Very brief and non-technical presentation about satellite communications given at the Master Team Agreement signing event held by Euroluna on 4 Feb 2011.
My name is Alex and I am member of a society called AMSAT-OZ, the Danish chapter of the Amateur Radio Satellite Organization. We do space communication as out hobby and we will help Euroluna with communications to the Mini Romit 1 cubesat.\n
We are located at the Engineering college in Ballerup, Copenhagen.\n
What do we need to communicate with a cubesat?\nFirst of all, we need a big antenna. This photo shows our parabolic dish with 7 meter diameter. \n
Doing some maintenance work on the 7 meter dish.\n
We also have smaller antennas. From left to right:\n- Cross yagi for 435 MHz band\n- Helix for 1.3 GHz\n- 90 cm dish used for 2.4 GHz\n- Cross yagi for 145 MHz\n
Late night work on the antennas with the 7 meter dish in the background and the Moon in the sky.\n
We also need a radio to receive telemetry from Mini Romit 1.\nTop: Classic stand-alone radio that works as is.\nBottom right: Software defined radio that requires a PC to perform signal processing\nBottom left: The latest innovation, FunCube Dongle USB receiver\n
\n
Telemetry downlink from the International Space Station using 1200 bps AFSK.\n
One of the challenges in satellite communication is that a satellite pass only lasts for a short time. This video demo shows a good passage of the International Space Station (ISS) that lasts for about 10 minutes. The ISS orbits at approximately 350 km altitude.\n
During a 24 hour period we typically have 3-5 satellite passes.\n