At the moment missing Tartu University station provided many unique packets, now HAM community contribution has been even more important. Thank you a lot for that!
Maybe following is an interesting information for you. We succeeded to spin-up the satellite up to 284 degrees per second using electromagnetic coils. Long logging runs during the spin-up and later as well to see the stability of the rotational axis resulted several megabytes of telemetry data. Now some students are chewing the data and hopefully in coming days, after some slight modifications to spin-up duty cycle (basically for how long time coils will be switched on), a new spin-up test will be done. This time hopefully up to 1 RPS.
This should be second and probably last spin-up test, following thorough logging. Then again satellite will be spun up to 1 RPS and tether end-mass locks will be burned. During that time, we plan to take images as well.. in the case the endmass should fly away because of possible broken tether. Let’s see what happens, I’m very excited :-)
What was also very interesting – seems that so high rotational speed did not cause any serious communication issues. That was one of our concerns originally – how low the actual data rate could be (10 %? 5%? :-) ). Seems that antenna pattern of a monopole antenna is enough potato-shaped that only when antenna nulls are pointing towards us, we don’t hear almost anything.
Also, a good example of power of parallel reception was IW0HLG receiving EC-1 some days ago, just in the first few minutes of a pass when satellite was low in the southern sky for us. During that time he got about 3x as many packets we received and most notably, his reception filled very well our signal minimums! Fantastic!