IARU Amateur Satellite Frequency Coordination
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IARU Amateur Satellite Frequency Coordination |
| ALFACRUX | Updated: 05 Jul 2022 | Responsible Operator | Renato Borges PU2ERB | |
| Supporting Organisation | University of Brasilia | |||
| Contact Person | raborges@aerospace.unb.br.nospam | |||
| Headline Details: A 1U CubeSat, the AlfaCrux is a university satellite developed by students and professors from the University of Brasilia (UnB), Brazil. It is the first space mission financed by the Government of the Federal District of Brazil. It is an amateur and educational mission to provide a hands-on experience to students and professors in the complete process of developing and operating a space mission. Specifically, the team will design, operate, and observe the behavior and performance of the AlfaCrux CubeSat in a space environment. Moreover, they will learn about radio electronics, antennas, digital communications, and radio amateur activities. As an additional goal, MSc. and PhD students from Electrical, Mechatronics, Mechanics, Production and Aerospace Engineering will test and demonstrate in orbit software defined radio experiments to perform ionospheric scintillation analysis and data collect from sensors in the ground. The package routing solution will allow forwarding of received messages back to Earth to support communication and messaging between radio amateurs (digital QSO), store it on-board, and transmit it to the ground station. Data collected will be available through internet and can be used for several applications: study of different methods for low-data rate communication, characterization of interference sources, atmospheric propagation effects, communication capability in terms of data rate, and link performance in terms of bit error date (BER) and signal to noise ratio (SNR). Finally, all the passages will be monitored through one main command and control ground station with support from the local amateur radio community. The telemetry information will be shared to all radio amateurs and networks before launch.The AlfaCrux CubeSat project fosters the educational collaboration and technical investigations carried out by amateurs, students, and professors from Brazil. It is developed by students and professors from the University of Brasilia with the support of the local radio amateur community. It has a sole purpose of selftraining in topics such as radiocommunications, technical management, system level design, development, integration, and operation of small satellites, without any pecuniary interest. The project promotes the interaction and collaboration with the radio amateur community in different ways, for example, training courses from radio amateurs from Brasilia, BR, about amateur radio concepts, support with the ground station installation and operation. It is expected that part of the members of the project will become amateur radio licensees, and further activities will be planned with the amateur community once the satellite is in orbit, such as educational seminar, telemetry reception and contest activities. Moreover, the amateur radio community will be involved in the educational activities developed at the university, strengthening the partnership and technical contributions to the analysis, for example SNR analysis to be conducted with measures in the baseband channel using the data transmitted by the satellite. Universities and radio amateurs are also invited to develop their own solution to communicate with the satellite user terminal for data collection, among other possibilities. Finally, the spacecraft has digipeater for HAM radio amateurs using AFSK/FM modulation at 1200 baud. Proposing a 9k6 GMSK telemetry and payload downlink and a 1k2 AFSK digipeater downlink on UHF. Planning a launch in Q1 2022 into a 550km SSO but no launch information has been provided. More info at https://lodestar.aerospace.unb.br/projects/alfacrux **The team has been advised that the IARU Satellite Frequency Coordination Panel considers this satellite project as a government funded IOT experiment and has informed them that IARU is not in a position to coordinate frequencies in the amateur satellite service for this mission** ** As a result of a request received from the Brazilian Licencing Authority, downlinks on 437.100 MHz 437.125 MHz and 437.225 MHz have been coordinated** | ||||
| Application Date: | 16 Aug 2021 | Freq coordination completed on | 05 Jul 2022 | |
The IARU Amateur Satellite Frequency Coordination Status pages are hosted
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