AMSAT-UK FUNcube SDR Dongle at Martlesham Microwave Round Table

Howard, G6LVB, gave a presentation this weekend at the Martlesham Microwave Round Table on the AMSAT-UK FUNcube SDR Dongle and has posted the following.

I was lucky enough to be asked to do a talk at the Martlesham Microwave Round Table today at BT's Adastral Park Research Centre, where most of the FUNcube satellite team met for the weekend for a serious bunch of tests and some excellent results that I am sure will appear very soon on http://www.funcube.org.uk/ .

The end result was that we did a full end-end test of commanding the satellite (albeit sitting on the bench!) and receiving the downlink, both telemetry and voice, successfully with the FUNcube Dongle.

But what a reception the Dongle received! I have to say I am deeply humbled and, just like last week at Kempton, I just wish I'd had a ton of them ready to sell.

All in all a great weekend – except for one thing. Three of the four units I built on Thursday night were a nightmare to get working. A delivery of solder paste was late so I used some old stuff that I've had in the fridge for at least five years.
BIG MISTAKE! It might have looked great when applied, but I had many, many shorts under the QFNs and even one 0402 resistor. That took about 3 hours to fix all three boards. Cough, don't want to be doing that on a batch of 100…

Howard G6LVB

FUNcube website
http://www.FUNcube.org.uk/

FUNcube SDR Dongle
http://www.FUNcubeDongle.com/

FUNcube Yahoo Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FUNcube/

Getting started on Amateur Radio Satellites PDF
http://www.uk.amsat.org/content/view/408/168/

AMSAT-UK publishes a colour A4 newsletter, OSCAR News, which is full of Amateur Satellite information.
Join online at https://secure.amsat.org.uk/subs_form/

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