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 hands-on activities during the station assembly and configuration.

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.

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.