Happy 12th Birthday to AO-73 (FUNcube-1)

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Happy 12th Birthday to AO-73 (FUNcube-1)

AO-73 celebrated its 12th birthday on 21 November 2025. The satellite is still operating well in full-time transponder mode.

On 21 November 2013, FUNcube-1 (AO-73) was launched from the Yasny launch base located in the Orenburg Region, Russia, on a Dnepr Launch Vehicle into a 600 km, 97.8º inclination sun-synchronous orbit. In this orbit, the satellite passes over the British Isles and Europe approximately 3 times in the morning, and 3 times in the evening, every day, perhaps allowing the morning passes to be used for educational purposes and the evening passes for Amateur Radio communications.

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Neural Codec Called 'Milestone' for Digital Voice

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It's being heralded as a milestone in the long-overdue evolution of speech quality for land-mobile radio systems - the use of an adaptive neural network that replaces traditional signal processing.

A digital voice milestone was announced at the recent acoustics and speech conference in California, where the Free DV Project's David Rowe, VK5DGR, co-presented a paper describing a neural network that replaces traditional signal processing with machine learning.

“the first known real-world deployment of a neural codec – an important milestone that the Ham community can be proud of.”
— Free DV Project's David Rowe, VK5DGR

Rowe and programmer Jean-Marc Valin presented the details to attendees at the IEEE Signal Processing Society conference, where David said it was well-received.

“provides unprecedented speech quality and robustness for VHF/UHF land mobile radio applications.”
— David Rowe, VK5DGR

Instead of using the fixed algorithms of traditional digital voice, the FreeDV Radio Encoder, known as RADE V1, employs fully adaptive machine learning to produce a higher-quality result, developed using open-source software.

The FreeDV Project - https://freedv.org/

Pirate Radio Broadcaster Agrees To $7,200 Payment

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The US Federal Communications Commission has announced that the government will be collecting a payment from an unlicensed radio operator in Massachusetts, settling an enforcement case from last year. The operator of a pirate radio station in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, has agreed to pay $7,200 to the US Treasury as part of a consent decree with the FCC.

The FCC said that the radio operator, Robert Bellinger, had been broadcasting on 93.1 FM without a license. The payment, which is part of his consent decree, was substantially reduced from the agency's original proposed forfeiture of $40,000 which it sought in 2024 in a notice of apparent liability. Bellinger responded to the notice at the time and told the FCC he was not able to pay the amount.

An FCC review of his finances resulted in an alternative solution -- a consent decree in which Bellinger admitted to his illegal broadcasts and a commitment to make the voluntary contribution specified.