Posted by Jason Davis to the Planetary Society blog at http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/2016/20160609-lightsail-2-morse-code.html
During last year's LightSail 1 mission, dozens of radio enthusiasts around the wrote in to tell us they heard our solar sailing CubeSat chattering away in low-Earth orbit.
Every few seconds, LightSail automatically transmits a beacon packet. These packets can be picked up by ground stations and decoded into 238 lines of text telemetry that describe the spacecraft's health and status. Everything from battery current to solar sail deployment motor state is included. We still plan to better support the worldwide radio community's efforts to help us capture those packets; that work is temporarily on the back burner while the engineering team focuses on getting the spacecraft ready for delivery.
Many off-the-shelf CubeSat software packages also have an option to transmit Morse code beacons, and for the LightSail 2 mission, we're activating this feature. Every 45 seconds, the spacecraft will transmit "L-S-2," and radio operators tuned in to the spacecraft's 437.325 megahertz frequency should be able to hear it.
In Morse code, L-S-2 looks like this:
.-.. / ... / ..---
If you capture the beacon using software-defined radio, it looks like this:
Justin Foley / The Planetary Society
