The 6th of June 2014 the 23cm voice repeater in The Hague was re-activated under callsign PI6HGL.
Since I do not own any transceiver to work this local repeater, I made my first QSOs with a signal generator and radio scanner as RX. This is less than optimal, so I decided to “click together” a transceiver in GNU Radio.
No warranty! its just an experiment!
A present received from the states by one of the Delfi-C3 team members!
Delfi-C3 has celebrated its 6th birthday on the 28th of April.
The spacecraft is still operational, telemetry only, on 145.870 USB
Delfi-C3 has exceeded its mission lifetime by six times now, and on-board telemetry still does not indicate degradation in performance.
So far, our distributed ground station network (DGSN) has collected 2037513 frames as of today, received by 376 registered radio amateurs and many more on the guest account, using the free RASCAL software. This would not have been possible without your continued support.
Thank you!
The original team of students has long graduated, and delfi-c3 operations are done by very few volunteers. We continue to monitor the live telemetry in our spare time.
This small team is pictured below:
From left to right: myself, Wouter Weggelaar PA3WEG – Wouter Jan Ubbels PE4WJ – Gerard Aalbers
Not pictured is Nils von Storch, a TU Delft student that is spending lots of his own time to keep the Delfi-C3 ground station in good shape and tracks various objects including our bird!
This is the archive of the live stream. Unfortunately, the youtube sound quality degraded in the archiving process.
The Video Matrix I designed has been completed and integrated together with a raspberry pi and user interface.
The software was made by Martijn PB0NER and the milling of the case was done by Terence Theijn. Final assembly also by Martijn.
When I built the fist prototype, I sent Martijn the data sheet of the used IC. The code he sent back was put on my raspberry Pi, and after some quick configuration, the basic functions worked straight away!
The Pi also doubles as test image & slideshow generator.
Martijn sent me these pictures of the finished matrix and it being installed in the rack of Herman PB0AHX.
I will publish some details here soon, and maybe write up an article.
Quick specs:
The following appears when you now go to the WebSDR:
This was the WebSDR receiver located in Delft JO21ex.
This receiver has been the first WebSDR after the original twente SDR, and I am very grateful to Pieter Tjerk PA3FWM for providing the WebSDR software to me.
After many firsts, I regret to inform you I have given up.The recent activities on the roof, lack of time, building access problems (I’m not a student anymore) and continuous problems left me to decide it was enough.
Thank you for the nice years, and thank you users for the kind words of encouragement.
We have been the first WebSDR with satellite reception, the first with 2m and 70cm reception. We also were there to provide VLF reception of SAQ grimeton radio for many listeners. Other highlights include being a mirror for the CAMRAS WebSDR during the Arecibo telescope EME activation, to distribute the load, and the usage of the WebSDR in lectures of the TU Delft.
Unfortunately, the downs include 3 damaged antennas, cut coaxes, water flooding the equipment room, metal dust from sandblasting in the equipment, building access problems and computer failures.
If I can find the time and money, I WILL BE BACK
Another small update
I have been working on the AMSAT-NL payload for the QB50 precursor flight, satellite 1.
This payload consists of two boards. A modified version of the RF board that only has the transponder and no telemetry, and a PA board that runs slightly more power. The main radio on the flight will be used for telemetry downlink, and the payload is transponder only. We could not fit the FUNcube CCT board, so we have no means of generating telemetry.
The precursors are slated for launch in April, so timescales are short for this flight.
Hi All,
The last couple of days have really been a blast! I am still catching up on E-mail and forum posts.
The FUNcube-1 team has received tons of compliments for the AO-73 transponder and mission in general, and the educational outreach is almost self-organizing in some countries. One that is lacking is off course the Netherlands …
Although there are some parts of FUNcube-1 that I am less proud of, having it work in orbit is absolutely great. When you launch satellites, you always prepare for launch pad explosion or failure to reach orbit. The next moment is deployment and first telemetry. On many occasions, CubeSats are not heard of after deployment. I have been so fortunate to have designed radio parts for all four dutch CubeSats that all happened to work!
In my day-job I am now tracking TRITON-1 as member of the control team, and I am following my other babies with great interest if time allows. The old lady Delfi-C3 is still doing well after all these years.
That feels totally weird!
ON5NY in JO10mv
2E0SQL in IO91js
G0MJW in IO91io
on the 22:39UTC pass