Is It A Bird? A Plane? Norfolk? No, It's Portugal!

The pretty pictures have arrived with an update from the Stevenage Groundstation. Here are two images received from the NOAA Weather Satellites from November/December.

To the right is a comparison between our image (top) with one from http://www.noaa-apt.com/ (bottom). You can see the North Atlantic with a slice of Portugal (not Norfolk) on the right. Above is a shot of Northern Europe with East Anglia and the North Sea visible in the left half of the picture (the sea is black by the way).

There's also a decoding of some Morse telemetry from LUSAT / LO-19. We now know that the Satellite box temperature #4 is 25 degrees Celsius, wow.

Can Do The Kessel Run In...

Neil Galbraith has taken the rotator controller kit ('LVB tracker') away to start building it this weekend hopefully.

However, if anyone else in the Portsmouth crew wants a shot at this, tools and soldering iron can be supplied, it should only take up one of your lunch hours.

There are actually 2 PCBs: a main board and a USB interface board. Almost all the parts are through-hole, so should be fairly easy to assemble to the PCB(s).

Any takers?

You’ve Got The Touch, You’ve Got The Power

From the triumphs of gaining their foundation radio licences, actual tangible hardware has arrived and is sitting waiting to be implemented. Antenna, radio, power supplies and the extraneous computer equipments that Portsmouth required to catch up with Stevenage on the groundstation stakes.

Construction will begin sooner rather than later.

Many thanks go out to Joanna Hall for purchasing our equipment, Kayti Harvey for IM support, Dan and Anthony for carting the computer equipment down for us, and our hardware/software suppliers.

Pass/Fail Criteria Has Been Met

Congratulations to those who attended and passed the foundation course for their amateur radio licence. It was two mornings, a lost weekend and maybe one too many glasses of wine on my part the night before.

For those that attended, listened and learnt, we all passed with flying colours (including the kid on the left of the picture above).

Here they are in no apparent order (apart from alphabetical if you look closely) (and A+ for the people with * by their names):

Robyn Crerar*, Nick Fishwick, Neil Galbraith, Enrique Granell Mena*, Pedro Lau Semedo, Kim Mitchell, Alessandro Modigliana, Andrew Quinn, Andrew Shum, Martin Wallace, Jonathan Ward.

Many thanks to Paul Steed and Peter Quinn for helping us in our endeavours, and also a mention to Jonathan Philips for sorting out the signals from the noise to get us onto this course.

Remember everyone, switch off the power before helping someone in trouble!

Pioneers and Hopeless Romantics

Keen pioneers or hopeless romantics, a chosen few have decided to get their call sign wings in the coming weeks. Just shows Lunchsat is moving in an encouraging and forward direction.

The following people have signed up for the radio licence course (in no apparent order):

Jonathan Ward, Neil Galbraith, Martin Wallace, Enrique Granell Mena, Andrew Shum, Kim Mitchell, Scott Rose, Allessandro Modigliana, Robyn Crerar, Andrew Quinn, Nicholas Fishwick.

Pictures will follow next week of fellow Lunchsatters studying hard to learn how to control a radio.

Additional Portsmouth news:

Ground station procurement is moving, quotes have been given, purchases will be made, and equipment will arrive;

Computer equipment courteously of the company has been given the OK to be in Lunchsatters hands.

Lunchsat is Alive!

Welcome to the Lunchsat weblog!

Lunchsat was born out of the ENS Innovation forum as a means to develop staff and give real spacecraft responsibilities to junior engineers.

We have a CubeSat kit and 25 of us have been involved in assembling and testing for a year now. We've also built an amateur satellite ground station from scratch in Stevenage and another in Portsmouth will follow in Q1 2008.

It’s been a success so far! If you are interested in joining and want to work on the satellite, ground station, be a senior review engineer or get to know more, contact Ronan Wall.