Graham,
My best wishes to you and your team. It will be an exciting week to be
sure. Your comments were very nicely put.
I'd would also like to commend your team for its "openness" all these
years about the project's status. For the life of me I fail to
understand why so many Cubesat projects appear to be "cloaked in
secrecy" when you try to to get information about their status. I think
the teams would do well to get a "PR" person on board along with the
analog/digital techies. Your program should be held as the model for
them to follow.
I know our FOX team is following your lead and perhaps will do even better.
Best of success to your team...Bill - N6GHz
On 11/17/2013 12:10 AM, Graham Shirville wrote:
Well it has finally arrived. Little did we think, back in 2009 that we would
not be launching FUNcube-1 until late 2013 but, at last, we are almost there.
The past four years have been spent trying to find a suitable launch
opportunity, dealing with many legal and administrative issues, in addition to
finalising the technical requirements for the spacecraft. We also then had to
convert those requirements and ideas into reality.
The core FUNcube team comprises of just about a dozen of us – radio amateurs
from the UK and the Netherlands together with software specialists from both
countries. A few of us even have skills in both the analogue and digital
domains!
We have met on numerous occasions for “face to face” meetings over weekends and
held weekly Skype chats almost every Sunday evening. We have had highs and lows
along the way but the end result – FUNcube-1 our tiny spacecraft, is now
sitting in an ISIPOD on the launch vehicle ready to take its chances in space
on Thursday. Many hours of evaluation and verification testing of both the
Flight Model and also the earlier Engineering Model have been undertaken, so we
are as confident as we can be that we have done the best job possible.
This mission could not have been carried forward without the efforts of the
team members but neither could it have been completed without the tremendous
support that it has received from individual radio amateurs and others and
other AMSAT groups around the world.
Thursday November 21st 2013 is our launch day and most of the team will be
assembled at the National Radio Centre at Bletchley Park to man a monitoring
station for at least the first two days following the launch.The first signals
from FUNcube-1 should be heard in Southern Africa and then in Hawaii and then
Alaska. After that, we hope to hear signals in the UK on a very low pass to the
east around 08:50 UTC.
We are very grateful to the RSGB for their support in allowing the use the NRC
facilities which should be perfect for this operation.
http://www.nationalradiocentre.com/ Although it is not large enough to be able
issue an open invitation to everyone to join us on the day, we will be trying
to do our best to keep everyone in touch with what is happening.
We will be setting up a webstream from the NRC using the services of the
BATC.tv server http://www.batc.tv/ch_live.php?ch=3 This should be available
from around 07:00 UTC on Thursday and will keep running for as long as we have
something to show. As well as shackcam views it will also have a breaking news
“tickertape” and some videos created during the development of the spacecraft.
Additionally we will maintain a presence on the #cubesat IRC channel which can
be easily accessed by a web client from here: http://webchat.freenode.net/
Of course our own www.funcube.org.uk website will also be kept up to date as
possible and updates will be provided here on AMSAT-BB.
So all we ask everyone to do now is to, download the FUNcube Dashboard, read
the guidance notes, register with the Data Warehouse and hang on for an
interesting Thursday. Oh and keep your fingers crossed.
Very many thanks for your support!
73
Team FUNcube
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_______________________________________________
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