W2CXM Cornell Amateur Radio Club

An update from Josh about the Alpha Cubesat / Solar Sail mission.

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We celebrated the season with our annual Festive Holiday Yagi party. This year, it was SO tall it went through the roof! Club members spent some time soldering up blinky light holiday ornaments as well.

The Solar Sail has been deployed and TinyGS stations around the world are receiving telemetry from one of the chipsats! Thanks so much to all who are contributing!

Update on the Solar Sail. At 8:47pm this evening, the Cubesat finally got a packet of telemetry back to the mission team. So, the team is fairly certain that the cubesat has received the "Release the Solar Sail" command. Until a confirmation packet from the cubesat is received, we won't know for sure that it's been successfully released. However, given the very short window the sail is expected to fly before deorbiting, the team is operating under the assumption that it has. If you're running a TinyGS station to help receive the telemetry, we request that you do go ahead and switch to "Manual" tuning, and configure it as in the previous post. Thanks!

Update on the Alpha Cubesat mission. The command to release the solar sail has been sent to the Cubesat, though it has not yet been acknowledged. If you set up a TinyGS station to help receive telemetry, please do go into Manual Tuning for your station and set it to "CornellLightSail".

Club members scoring "hundreds' of contacts for the Collegiate QSO Party this afternoon. And by hundreds we mean a few dozen. ;-) We're trying though!!!