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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Is AO-7 Still the Oldest Satellite?

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AMSAT-OSCAR 7, or AO-7, is the second Phase 2 amateur radio satellite constructed by the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (AMSAT). It was launched into Low Earth Orbit on 15 November 1974 and remained operational until a battery failure in 1981. After 21 years of apparent silence, the satellite was heard again on 21 June 2002 – 27 years after launch, and it continues to be used by amateurs daily even now. For a couple of decades, AMSAT has been able to proudly boast that this bird is the oldest operating satellite in space.

However, that record has been challenged. After 47 years of silence, LES-1, a satellite launched by the U.S. Air Force and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in 1965, began transmitting again. Its signals were detected by Phil Williams, G3YPQ, from North Cornwall in southwest England on 18 December 2012, verified by other members of the Hearsat group, Flávio A. B. Archangelo, PY2ZX, in Brazil on 22 December 2012, and Matthias Bopp, DD1US, in Germany on 27 December 2012.

According to Williams, LES-1 was determined to be tumbling with a rotation rate of once every four seconds, as determined by distinctive fading of the signals. It is possible that, after 47 years, the batteries failed in a manner that allows them to carry charge directly through to the transmitter on 237 MHz, allowing the satellite to resume transmissions when it is in sunlight. The satellite continues to be operational as tracked by the SatNOGS network.

Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data

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Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data

With just $800 in basic equipment, researchers found a stunning variety of data—including thousands of T-Mobile users’ calls and texts and even US military communications—sent by satellites unencrypted.

Satellites beam data down to the Earth all around us, all the time. So you might expect that those space-based radio communications would be encrypted to prevent any snoop with a satellite dish from accessing the torrent of secret information constantly raining from the sky. You would, to a surprising and troubling degree, be wrong.

Roughly half of geostationary satellite signals, many carrying sensitive consumer, corporate, and government communications, have been left entirely vulnerable to eavesdropping, a team of researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Maryland revealed today in a study that will likely resonate across the cybersecurity industry, telecom firms, and inside military and intelligence agencies worldwide.

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