On Tuesday July 26 the radios that will be used as communication devices on MURSAT1 arrived. We will use off-the-shelf amateur radio equipment that will be case modded inside the TubeSat shell. So we had these radios in our hands and that is something really tempting for children 25+.
Christian has a working setup of the beacon transmitter so we figured a way to radio-test the beacon. Use the radio transmitter’s microphone, hold it close enough to the beacon speaker and transmit the signal across the table using a free frequency. The receiver was hooked up to a netbook which ran a copy of fldigi to decode the CW beacon. The experiment was conducted and supervised by licensed radio amateur Bernhard (call sign OE6EOF). Here’s the result: Beacon Test.
You can replay that to fldigi and should get the following result:
N OE6EOF F3M A
The N could be called the header and is currently used to tell whoever is listening how long a “.” and a “-” are (which is of importance for software trying to decode CW). Following you find Bernhard’s call sign and next is a counter – mainly used to test counting and base 32 encoding. The F3M represents the number 5996. The last character is a checksum. Now, the checksum here should be G, but a bug in the current implementation calculated an A. Beacon specs and further details will be published soon (probably on our Wiki).