QIKCOM-1 APRS Satellite

[K7MT]

WB4APR at the Naval Academy sent out a bulletin that the students will have one of their small APRS satellites placed in orbit in the near future. This is going to be cool !! Anyone interested in APRS might find this interesting... Bill K7MT

Link to the quikcom-1 satellite information on the Naval Academy web site:

http://aprs.org/qikcom-1.html

> Behalf Of Robert Bruninga
> Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2015 9:32 AM
> To: aprssig@tapr.org
> Subject: [aprssig] QIKcom Satellite Modes?
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> APRS Satellite operators:
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> We are delivering our next APRS satellite (QIKcom-1) next week and it will have a mission life of maybe 6 months.
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> It is a very quick reaction short fuse opportunity so we are simply going to fly an APRS digipeater (TinyTrack4) supporting the three digipeater aliases of ARISS, APRSAT and WIDEn-N but it will operate at 4 Watts RF power and be easily heard on any HT..
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> It has no other CPU on board and so it flies with only the fixed settings set before launch.
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> But we do have an A/B switch which can be used to switch between two bank settings.
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> I just cannot think of any neat must-do ideas for how to use the other bank settings.
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> The host spacecraft has plenty of power, so there is no need for low power options… (they can simply turn us off if needed). Telemetry is a boring Volts, current, and two internal temps. The settings in bank 0 are now:
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> DIGIPEATER: ON
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> ALIASES: ARISS, APRSAT, WIDEn-N
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> BTEXT: USNA-W3ADO APRS Satellite every 2 minutes
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> TELEMETRY: every 1 minute.
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> I just cannot think of any use for a separate bank settings?
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> If you have ideas of how to use the A/B settings let me know.
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> Bob, WB4aPR