[amsat-bb] AMSAT BoD Election... Please Vote!
Burns Fisher
wb1fj-bb at fisher.cc
Tue Sep 8 13:40:41 UTC 2020
It seems perfectly clear that the root problem with AO-92 is that the
batteries are no longer holding a charge as well as they did when new. I
am not a battery expert, and unfortunately, we had no battery expert
volunteers when the Foxes were being built (although we do now). Fox was
designed for AMSAT engineering and ops to learn about cubesats. This is
one of the things we learned. All the Foxes are complete--there is nothing
we can do about that except work for better results on Golf.
Another issue is that AO-92 sometimes stays in safe mode after the voltage
rises again as it exits eclipse and requires a command station to start the
repeater again. That is not the design. I'll take responsibility for that
behavior since I wrote that software. And believe me I *am* analysing it
to ensure future birds that I work on don't have that bug (which is subtle
to the extent that I have not yet found it, or even been able to reproduce
it on the ground).
I'd add that these problems are most likely based on volunteer engineers
with limited time butting up against fixed launch schedules set by large
for-profit corporations with big payrolls. It's hard for me to imagine
blaming the board of a volunteer, non-profit corporation for this situation.
73,
Burns Fisher, WB1FJ
AMSAT Flight Software Volunteer
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