SB SPACE @ ARL $ARLS007
ARLS007 South African Amateur Radio Payload Reaches Orbit
ZCZC AS07
QST de W1AW
Space Bulletin 007 ARLS007
From ARRL Headquarters
Newington, CT September 18, 2009
To all radio amateurs
SB SPACE ARL ARLS007
ARLS007 South African Amateur Radio Payload Reaches Orbit
After several delays, South Africa's SumbandilaSat satellite finally
blasted to orbit aboard a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome
in Kazakhstan on September 16. The main payload is a multi-spectral
imager, but the satellite also carries an Amateur Radio component
consisting of a 2 meter/70 cm FM repeater.
After SumbandilaSat is fully commissioned, the repeater will be
activated with an uplink at 145.880 MHz and a downlink at 435.350
MHz; there will also be a voice beacon at 435.300 MHz. The
transponder mode will be controlled by a CTCSS tone on the uplink
frequency. The CTCSS tone frequencies have yet to be announced.
SumbandilaSat was sponsored by the Department of Science and
Technology and was built at SunSpace in cooperation with the
Stellenbosch University.
In addition to the SA-AMSAT amateur module, the satellite carries
Stellenbosch University's radiation experiment and software defined
radio (SDR) project, an experiment from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan
University and a VLF radio module from the University of
KwaZulu-Natal.
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/EX
