Recent meetings on transponder and IHU for
Phase 3E and Eagle
I have uploaded my pictures from two recent meetings:
http://n4hy.smugmug.com/gallery/1000064
is the gallery from the November AMSAT Eagle RF meeting held at Lintech
in Hamilton, NJ. Lintech is Al Katz' (K2UYH) company.
We have KD6OZH signed up to do the receivers, N2UO signed up for the
HELAPS/ EER transmitters, W1GHZ has taken on the job of design of some
very important pieces of our ambitious 5 GHz system, CC Rider. Jan came
and did a
massive dump on the use of his most recent work for link budget analysis.
Al Katz has given us lab space, access to test equipment, a clean room
space, etc. in his fast growing facility at Lintech.
http://n4hy.smugmug.com/gallery/1050435
is the gallery from my most recent trip to Marburg to work on the IHU-3
and the SDX. Also in attendance for the SDX were AB2KT, G6LVB , KK7P representing
us and DL1YDD, DB2OS, DJ4ZC, and DL6DBN for AMSAT-DL.
AMSAT-DL is considering flying the Software Defined Transponder (SDX)
in P3E and nothing will fly without the IHU-3! For that reason we are
extremely happy to report that Stacey Mills recently completed the radiation
tests of the IHU-3 and it 20,000 rads and still works.
Howard (G6LVB) demonstrated the working SDX baseline software, including
the now successfully modified and perfected STELLA. You can see some of
the pictures of the 10.7 MHz baseband unit and his pickoff of these IF's
in a 2 meter and 70 cm rigs.
Expect to hear lots more about these meetings in my upcoming Engineering
Notes columns in the AMSAT journal, some other papers which I hope will
be published in the AMSAT DL journal and in QEX.
There is almost no way I can express how utterly fantastic an experience
this trip was for me personally. I have been on the receiving end of many
days of one-on-one technical work with Karl and the net result was a huge
transfer of technology, documentation, etc. that simply must be captured
and you may expect it to be documented heavily.
One really nice area is the re-emergence of IPS in 32 bit form. Karl
has granted permission to put almost everything up for a look see under
the Gnu Public License. Some things, such as engine fire codes and command
codes will be changed to protect the innocent spacecraft, but this will
be a new thing. I expect this documentation and software to be uploaded
on both the AMSAT-DL and AMSAT-NA web sites. Expect to hear much more
on SDX, IHU, and IPS in the coming days.
As you may have seen, Karl has recently released all of his HELAPS notes
and Jan, Karl, Gordon Hardeman, et. al. have released a huge volume on
HELAPS done a long time ago by them. With the advent of SDX, we can implement
all of Karl's original thesis ideas on HELAPS. He gave us a fantastiche
lecture and taught us a few tricks. One of the most amazing things I saw
was the 90% efficient full legal power LINEAR amplifier for 80-10 meters
built over 30 years ago. It is so linear that it is hard to tell the difference
in the IMD from that of the transmitter driving it! With SDX in the driver's
seat (pun intended) we can expect, if we do our work carefully, a large
improvement in the IMD and other characteristics of the HELAPS transmitters
in future spacecraft.
There is a lot going on so wake up and raise the temperature on the thermometer.
More later/Später, season's greetings to one and all,
Bob
N4HY
• AMSAT-UK
produce a quarterly newsletter "Oscar News" which is full of
Amateur Satellite information. For membership details contact the secretary
Jim Heck G3WGM
Tel: +44 (0)1258 453959
E-mail: g3wgm@amsat.org
Website: http://www.uk.amsat.org/
Online Satellite Pass Predictions:
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