German Orbital Systems reports a successful telemetry downlink has been received.

D-Star ONE Sparrow and D-Star ONE iSat were successfully launched on 27th December 2018 as part of an ECM smallsat cluster on the Soyuz-2/Fregat from Russia's Vostochny launch site.

During the first orbits, beacons were received in the US, Germany, Czech Republic and Belarus, confirming the successful separations of the satellites on their target orbit 585 km, 97.73 deg, SSO.

D-Star ONE Sparrow and D-Star ONE iSat are a pair of 3U cubesats which are equipped with four identical radio modules with D-Star capabilities, all being operated in a half-duplex mode. At press time DSTAR One Sparrow was planned to be used for amateur radio.

DK3WN received the first telemetry on 29th December 2018 with more signals received by Scott, K4KDR and Vladimir, EU1SAT.

D-Star ONE Sparrow operates as a half duplex repeater:

Callsign: DP1GOS
Uplink: 437.325 MHz
Downlink: 435.525 MHz RF-Power: 800-1200 mW
Telemetry: 435.700 MHz 4k8 GMSK Mobitex (CMX990 Mobitex Format)

The telemetry format is documented - http://tinyurl.com/ANS-006-DSTAR-ONE-Telemetry

A telemetry decoder - http://www.dk3wn.info/p/?page_id=29535

Technical details for radio amateurs - http://tinyurl.com/ANS-006-DSTAR-ONE-Amateur

A D-Star voice message beacon transmits once a minute. All modules are operated in a power save mode. This means that they are in idle for 40 seconds and then in receive mode for 20 seconds.

Once a signal has been received, the modules switch to receive mode for five minutes. So it might be necessary to "ping" the satellite a couple of times until an answer is received.

Object #43879 continues to be a likely fit for tracking at present.

German Orbital Systems - http://www.d-star.one/

More Info on D-Star One - http://tinyurl.com/ANS-006-DSTAR-ONE