WE-WISH and FITSAT-1 Received

The recently released Cubesats were due to pass with high elevation late last evening, so the new antenna was mounted out in the garden on a tripod and the FUNCube Dongle connected to the trusty laptop in the shack.

The Cubesats FITSAT-1, WE-WISH and TechEdSat are now supported by the Satellite-AR application on my android phone allowing me a reasonable chance at tracking them.

According to the tracking data the WE-WISH Cubesat is ahead of FITSAT-1 on the orbit, so my first attempt was to capture some of the Infra-Red SSTV imagery it is sending back, I did managed to receive the signal as you can see on the waveform below, you will also see SDR-Radio was preforming doppler correction very well  indicated by the slanted central IQ spur and local 'carrier' in the middle of the transmission (was playing back a captured IQ wavefile) Sadly the WE-WISH signal wasn't strong enough and didn't last long enough for any meaningful decode, but I was able to confirm that instead of being at 437.505MHz it is nearer 437.514MHz as was reported on AMSAT-UK

WE-WISH Downlink Transmission, received in UK 16-OCT-2012 19:32UTC

I was very happy to have received this as the WE-WISH downlink transmitter is reported to be only 100mW! As the signal disappeared I quickly switched to the latter stages of the FITSAT-1 pass and got some nice clear bursts of the CW beacon.

FITSAT-1 Downlink Transmission, received in UK 16-OCT-2012

Tonight there are two other nice high elevation passes of the Cubesat cluster, so hopefully will get out to have another attempt.