COMPASS 1 - Cubesat in Space

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Cubesat COMPASS-1 from the FH Aachen, launched at 28. April 2008

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  1. 27. October 2009

    The antenna problem still won’t let me sleep at night. One month ago I thought I finished all on the electrical part of the Radio-Antenna system. One week ago now, I finished my rebuilding on the winch to pull the antennas back in the air. Everything seemed fine, the winch was working great with the new winchline and at the end of the day I tracked Compass-1 ! Nice o hear the sound after such a long period. The Signal strength was about S7 to S9 during the complete pass. I was really fascinated. even at low elevations the signal didn’t lost of it’s strength. I thought that everything would be fine…. Till I measured the SWR …

    The 70cm Band was not quite optimal, It ounced from 1.1 to 1.6 through the band, but fortunately it was about 1.2 at the nominal frequency where we listen to our signals.

    But the 2m Band was totally crap (sorry for that word, but it’s horrrible when you spend so much time to fix the system, completed the work with good results, put the antennas back in the air one month afterwards and then you realise that it’s all a waste of time)   So I tried to look for the bug in the system. Now the antenna is down again and I slowly don’t feel doing this any more … Hopefully the desire repairing the antenna comes back again.

    73 Felix

    DO3FKA