By now, our Geoscan-Edelveis CubeSat has been operating normally in Earth orbit for four months, receiving commands and transmitting data to the Geoscan ground station. We are always happy when signals from the satellite are received not only by our operators and designers, but also by radio amateurs in different parts of our country and around the world.
In September, user SP5LOT (Warsaw, Poland) obtained a photo of the Earth with his ground station and then decoded it with special software. This was done while the Geoscan-Edelveis satellite was communicating with the ground station in St. Petersburg. After that, other radio amateurs (including VE3SVF and SA2KNG) became interested in receiving photos from our CubeSat. In spite of certain difficulties, they, together with our operator, wrote a program that decodes the signal received on the radios and demodulated with GetKISS+ or SoundModem software.
Recently, on the night of December 6 to 7, Dmitry Pashkov (R4UAB) conducted a test reception of images at the ground station in Mordovia. This is the first time a radio amateur from Russia has received a picture from our CubeSat!
The first photo from Geoscan-Edelveis, received and decoded by radio amateur SP5LOT
Photo obtained from Geoscan-Edelveis by Dmitry Pashkov (R4UAB)
In addition to photos of Earth and space, the CubeSat broadcast an image with our company logo (a station operator uploaded it to the satellite in advance). With the help of our software and advice from our specialist, user PE0SAT (Netherlands) was the first to receive the emblem from space, followed by R1NAV (Russia). All in all, involved in receiving such images were radio amateurs from Russia (R4UAB, R1NAV), Poland (SP5LOT), the Netherlands (PE0SAT), Sweden (SA2KNG) and other European and North American countries.
Soon we will prepare and make available to everybody a special instruction on how to receive satellite images. The broadcasting schedule will appear on the community website and in amateur radio chats. We also accept applications for QSL cards. To be eligible, you must receive at least two packets of information from our CubeSat every day for two days. The collected data is uploaded to the form within 24 hours after the last telemetry packet is received. The Geoscan-Edelveis satellite frequency is 436.200 MHz 9600/19200 bps GFSK. The amateur radio telemetry protocol can be found here.
Since the launch of the CubeSat, when radio amateurs helped to identify it in NORAD, members of the SatNOGS community have been planning observations and helping each other with decoding signals from Geoscan-Edelveis in a forum thread about our space mission. We made sure that radio amateurs are not only a serious community, but also a pleasant supportive team, always ready to help!