AMSAT GOLF-TEE Initiative Meets Major Milestone
/AMSAT has reported that an array of GOLF-TEE (Greater Orbit Larger Footprint – Technology Evaluation Environment) satellite prototype boards transmitted telemetry for the first time on 14th January 2020.
“The boards are laid out on a bench as a ‘flat-sat,’ with interconnecting wires, bench power supplies, and a dummy load on the transmitter”
The interconnected boards include an early radiation-tolerant internal housekeeping unit (IHU, i.e., computer) prototype; a control interface prototype, and a set of spare boards from HuskySat-1 that act as prototypes for the legacy IHU and legacy VHF/UHF RF components.
“Now that the development team has reached this point, it has RF to use as a basis for developing a GOLF-TEE decoder for FoxTelem, the ground telemetry receiver software. Thousands of hours of work by many AMSAT volunteers have gone into the hardware and software that got GOLF-TEE this far, with much work yet to be done before flight units are ready.”
GOLF-TEE is designed as a low-Earth orbit testbed for technologies necessary for successful CubeSat missions to a wide variety of orbits, including medium- and high-Earth orbits.
