[amsat-bb] OSCAR-11 Annual Report 2012

Sat Feb 2 07:47:17 PST 2013

                OSCAR-11 ANNUAL REPORT  2012

This report covers the period from 01 January 2012 to 01
January 2013. During this time there have been no
significant changes apart from the gradual drift of the
on-board clock. The satellite has been transmitting on a
regular cycle of 10.35 days on followed by 10.35 days off.

OSCAR-11 (AKA UoSAT-2 and UO-11) celebrated it's
28th birthday in space on 01 March! It was designed, built
and launched within a period of six months, using
commercially available 'off the shelf' components (COTS).
Once again, congratulations to Professor Sir Martin Sweeting
G3YJO, his team at the University of Surrey and the groups
of radio amateurs who also contributed to the project.

Good copy has been obtained obtained from decoded telemetry
frames and many reports have been posted on the DCARR
general satellite status website,

The satellite continues to be subjected to eclipses during
each orbit, resulting in weaker signals at those times.
During the summer in the UK all passes were in sunlight,
however the eclipses gradually returned during the autumn
and now all evening passes are eclipsed and signals are
significantly weaker than in the morning passes.

The on-board clock gained 85 seconds during the year, which
is comparable with the 60 seconds gain per year when the
satellite was launched. There is however a large accumulated
error of 308.54204 days slow. This was caused mainly by the
clock stopping during eclipses, when there was also an
unknown drain on the power supply. The units of the least
significant digit correspond approximately to seconds (0.86
seconds actually).

At the present time, while OSCAR-11 is operating in a
predictable way, please DO NOT send reports or files by
e-mail. However, could all listeners continue to enter their
reports on the general satellite status website. This is a
very convenient and easy to use facility, which shows the
current status of all the amateur satellites, and is of use
to everyone. Reports around the expected times of switch-on
and switch-off are of special interest, especially for times
13:00 to 18:00 and 22:00 to 08:00 UTC, to when the satellite
is out-of-range in the UK . The URL is
http://oscar.dcarr.org/index.php

The VHF beacon frequency is 145.826 MHz.  AFSK FM ASCII
Telemetry. The satellite is operating in the default mode,
controlled by the watchdog timer, with a cycle time of 20.7
days. 10.35 days on followed by 10.35 days off.

An extended version of this report is available on my
website, and new listeners to OSCAR-11 should read this for
further information. The URL is www.g3cwv.co.uk/oscar11.htm
. This page contains links to the report, a short audio clip
to help you identify the satellite and a file of recent
telemetry received. The website also contains an archive of
news & telemetry data which is updated from time to time,
and details about using a soundcard or hardware demodulators
for data capture. There is also software for capturing data,
and decoding ASCII telemetry.

The easiest way to check whether OSCAR-11 is operational is
to look at the General Satellite Status website
http://oscar.dcarr.org/index.php .

If you place this bulletin on a terrestrial packet network,
please use the bulletin identifier $BID:U2RPT158.CWV, to
prevent duplication.

73 Clive G3CWV xxxxx at amsat.org (please replace the x's by
g3cwv)