SuitSat thoughts and additional challenges

It has been over a week now and SuitSat is still operational. It is quite impressive to see the outstanding detective work the amateur community is performing to determine the full message structure of SuitSat, its secret words, SSTV and telemetry information. Please keep the telemetry information coming in!!

Now, more than ever, we need to see how long SuitSat will stay in operation. The SuitSat team plans to provide special recognition to the person that copies the last SuitSat telemetry, specifically the Mission Time and Battery Voltage.

There has been a lot of dialog on the -bb regarding the AO-54 designator. While some may disagree with SuitSat-1/Radioskaf receiving this designator, the AMSAT International team that fabricated, tested and delivered this experiment in 3 weeks are quite honored that AMSAT provided this designation.

I thought you'd like to understand why we specifically requested the AMSAT-OSCAR designator as compared to other OSCAR designator configurations that have been discussed on the AMSAT-bb. We did this for two reasons:

1) to honor the AMSAT international team that was ingenious enough to develop and deliver a sophisticated ham radio experiment that met the stringent human spaceflight requirements in such a short period of time and
2) to recognize AMSAT--the international organization with a long history of developing very low cost, pioneering spacecraft

Prior to the release of SuitSat/Radioskaf, we knew that this satellite was destined to capture the imagination of students and the general public, worldwide. The publicity that SuitSat has garnered for AMSAT and the amateur radio community is some of the best ever. One excellent metric of this is the hits at the www.suitsat.org web site. We have received over 7.5 million hits this past week with 2.2 million on the day that SuitSat was deployed.

While I had hoped that the SuitSat signal strength would have been much greater, SuitSat has taught me and I hope others some valuable lessons. Most importantly, it has taught me to sharpen my radio reception skills and has given me additional incentive to improve my station reception capabilities.

Other items of Note:

--SuitSat power supply----Steve, N7HPR mentioned that the SuitSat power supply is a 28V-to-12V DC-DC converter and EMI filter which is connected to three Russian supplied 28V batteries in parallel. One additional piece of information. The DC-DC converter and EMI filter design is identical to the power supply system that runs the Phase 1 ARISS system. This is the Ericsson and Packet system that is located in the FGB.

--Expected SuitSat orbit life----I have seen an orbit analysis, performed to ensure that no ISS-SuitSat recontact occurs, which predicts a 70-120 day orbital life for SuitSat. The orbit life, of course, is dependent on the atmospheric drag that the satellite experiences. Anyone seen SuitSat yet? I would expect you will need binoculars to see it.

--We got word from NASA yesterday that a piece of the Suit has detached. Lee, KU4OS described this in a -bb message and provided the Kep set below.

SUITSAT DEB
1 28934U 05035D 06041.32895386 .00163102 00000-0 98541-3 0 22
2 28934 051.6406 119.8476 0008149 262.6301 097.3530 15.76561648 329

--And finally I would like to thank all those that have kept the worldwide community informed of the latest information on SuitSat. This includes the
http://www.suitsat.org website sponsored by Steve Dimse, K4HG,
http://www.aj3u.com/blog/ sponsored by A.J. Farmer, AJ3U,
http://pd0rkc.ontwikkel.nl/ sponsored by Cor,
the bulletins sent by Miles, WF1F and the AMSAT news/web page team---Emily, N1DID, JoAnne, WB9JEJ and many others!

Thanks to all and keep that SuitSat telemetry coming in!!

73, Frank H. Bauer, KA3HDO
AMSAT-VP for Human Spaceflight Programs
ARISS International Chairman

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