Hi all!
We had an excellent pass today. It’s apparently one every other 4 days. And it “makes sense” since every 4 days the passes are exactly the same.
So today we also sent lots of commands. Among those, we sent a command to retrieve the gyroscope recordings from the first hour after launch, but we sadly found out that the satellite reset itself before the first hour of its life, and nothing was recorded :(
We also sent a command to turn on and boot one of the payloads, the payload computer, and we successfully retrieved the boot message of the linux running on this computer, so we know the linux is working. This is a great new, since it’s the first result of one of our experiments!
We also increased a bit the Tx power, not permanently, but until the satellite resets again, this’ll be tomorrow around 6am UTC.
And we also tried to power on and retrieve telemetry from another payload (a motor/momentum wheel), but it didn’t work (the command did get through, several times, but apparently something else failed. I’m not surprised and nothing can be concluded from this, we’ll try again).
So, although not much has changed in terms of reception, we are finally learning to talk to the baby and slowly getting some results, though we’d like it to be much better.
We’ve found out some people here in Argentina who have antennas and all to do moon bouncing in UHF, and they invited us to use their setup. So we believe we’ll have better and more fluid communications with the CubeBug soon, and hopefully we’ll be able to try to do something to improve the situation.
Gera
00:32 UTC Colin, VK5HI: Did not note any significant variance in signal strength.