FASTRAC mission update from JSC Amateur Radio Club

FASTRAC-2 (Emma)
FAST-2 is alive, needs a reset, and has not been commanded yet. FAST-1 and FAST-2 remain attached as planned.

FAST-2’s 1200 bps 3-minute beacon (145.825 MHz) reverted to 9600bps at two minute intervals over night last night. This indicates that the TNC reset itself and the on-board microprocessor wasn’t responsive to restore the settings. This is not serious, but we can’t reset things until we can command the satellites.
FAST-2’s 1200bps beacon had not been updating for the last couple of days which told us at the least, the I2C bus had locked up some time back. We knew this would happen periodically before launch, so this behavior is not unexpected.
FAST-2 has been actively rejecting 9600bps crosslink requests from FAST-1 at 10-minute intervals due to the I2C bus lockup. They had previously been heard by several stations around the world crosslinking the first few orbits after launch Friday evening.
FAST-2’s downlink frequency seems to be about 2-3kHz higher than advertized, so we know the coms subsystem is not at room temperature.

FASTRAC-1 (Sara Lily)
FAST-1 is alive, is beaconing, is attempting to crosslink with FAST-2, but the 437.435 MHz downlink is much weaker than predicted. Nobody to my knowledge has been able to decode beacon data from FAST-1 yet.
FAST-1’s UHF beacon (437.345 MHz) is much weaker than FAST-2. We have heard it occasionally but just above the noise floor.
FAST-2’s responses to FAST-1’s connect requests lead us to believe that FAST-1 is most likely functioning normally.

Thomas M. Campbell

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