Brazilian Students building QO-100 ground station

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Brazilian Students building QO-100 ground station

High school students in Brazil are building a ground station for the amateur radio transponder on the QO-100 geostationary satellite as part of a STEM education project

A group of eight students, from Colégio Embraer Casimiro Montenegro Filho in Botucatu state of São Paulo, are participating in all steps of the project with the help of teachers and amateur radio volunteers from LABRE/AMSAT-BR (Edson PY2SDR, Demilson PY2UEP, José PU2MJR).

The station consists of a 1.2m offset dish antenna, an Amiko L-104 LNBF, a home-made bias-t, a RTL-SDR receiver and SDRsharp software running on a dedicated computer. During the project students were exposed to several STEM topics related to radio communications, antennas, software defined radios, geostationary orbits as well as hand-on activities during the station assembly and configuration.

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Chinese Satellite CAS-7B Carrying an FM Transponder Scheduled to Launch

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Chinese Satellite CAS-7B Carrying an FM Transponder Scheduled to Launch

CAS-7B – a combined Amateur Radio and educational satellite which is shown above – is scheduled to launch on Monday 22nd July 2019.

The Chinese Amateur Satellite Group (CAMSAT) is working on the project with the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), one of the most famous aerospace universities in China. Many teachers and students from the university are participating in the development and testing of the satellite and the university is also providing support for the launch.

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Chinese CAS-7B Satellite Carrying an FM Transponder

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CAMSAT CEO Alan Kung, BA1DU, reports that CAS-7B (BP-1B) is expected to launch on July 22 at 0500 UTC, on the Hyperbola 1 vehicle. CAS-7B is a spherical spacecraft, 500 millimeters (approximately 19.7 inches) in diameter with a mass of 3 kilograms (about 6.6 pounds). The CW telemetry beacon will be on 435.715 MHz. The V/U FM 16 kHz wide transponder downlink is 435.690 MHz, and the uplink is 145.900 MHz. The launch from Jiuquan will be into a 300-kilometer (approximately 186-mile), 42.7° inclination orbit.