[amsat-bb] FUNCube Telemetry Received in Havana with RTL-SDR

[Raydel Abreu Espinet (CM2ESP)]

Hi all,

I was able to receive up to 10KB (size of the resulting .funcubebin 
file) of Telemetry from FUNCube-1 (AO-73) here at my home in Havana, 
Cuba, (EL83sc) during the 03:41-03:52 UT pass of Nov. 26th.

I used a MAR-8 MMIC pre-amp with ZERO filtering, a QFH antenna and a 
cheap RTL-SDR dongle. Software was SDRSharp with Plugin for Doppler 
Control and Orbitron as Sat Tracking Software.

Even with the poorly filtered and not too much sensitive RTL-SDR dongle 
the signals amplified with the also poorly filtered MAR-8 pre-amp was 
VERY STRONG even in complete Eclipse.

I used Virtual Audio Cable software to feed the demodulated audio into 
the FUNCube Dashboard software and it was very smooth. I am very happy 
because after many days being busy I was finally able to get some free 
time to try listening to FUNCube. CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE FUNCUBE AND 
AMSAT-UK TEAM!!!

Today at the GROS (the Cuban Satellite Group) we created and registered 
an account in the FUNCube Warehouse data server to upload all the 
received Telemetry. The most common Internet access in Cuba are at 
workplaces which usually has a proxy server for Internet navigation and 
the FUNCube Dashboard has no proxy compatibility, that's why many of our 
hams cannot upload directly the received telemetry frames. To overcome 
this issue and to contribute with the telemetry forwarding the GROS_Cuba 
user was created and we will be sending the telemetry through a direct 
Internet line at IGA (Cuba's Institute of Geophysics and Astronomy, see: 
www.iga.cu). This morning a total of 124 frames received from Hector 
CO6CBF and Pavel CO7WT were uploaded.

Tomorrow I will upload more telemetry received, including the frames 
received by me and also Pavel's and Hector's data in case they have some 
more frames from today.

73,

Raydel Abreu Espinet, CM2ESP
EL83sc, Havana, Cuba.