Hej,
Dagens nät på 3740 Khz klockan
10.00
Deltagare
SM4EFW
SM4JLX
SM5HL
SM6NZV
SM7WSJ
*Lite
smått och gott runt satelliter avhandlades.
*Uppdatering angående AMSAT
UK funcube projektet.
Folks I’ve been enormously gratified by the
large volume of interest I’ve had in the FUNcube Dongle over the past few
weeks, and as the pace of enquiries has stepped up I’ve decided to come clean
about the development progress.
In case -bb subscribers are unaware, the
FUNcube Dongle was originally designed to be an accessible way to be able to
receive amateur satellites, most noteably AMSAT-UK’s forthcoming FUNcube
cubesat (http://www.funcube.org.uk). What does
accessible mean? Essentially we mean both low cost and easy to setup. The
original target market is, and remains, what I call the unconverted, those,
particularly in education, who need a means of being able to practically
introduce and demonstrate real space
technology in a hands-on
way.
When the work on FUNcube was distributed, I was given the task of
coming up with the ground segment, and the result is the FUNcube
Dongle.
As it’s tuned out, the FUNcube Dongle has the added bonus that
it’s a
VHF/UHF and low microwave equivalent to the well-known Softrock in
an integrated plug and play package. We intend to have two models,
an entry-level frequency-restricted version targeted at the educational
market, and a full blown Pro version that seems to piqued the interest of
many radio amateurs, radio astronomers and short wave listeners.
In
pr?cis, it includes an integrated front end filter, LNA, quatrature
LO,
zero-IF quadrature downconverter, dual 16 bit ADC and USB soundcard. In
it’s simplest of forms, it’s SMA in, USB out. It’s also compatible with
pretty much any software that works for the Softrock, for example
LinRad, Spectravue, M0KGK and Rocky.
The passband is 96kHz, tuneable
from 64MHz to 1,700MHz. The tuning is via a USB HID interface meaning that as
well as your favourite soundcard SDR program, you’ll need a little app
supplied with the FUNcube Dongle to control the centre frequency or you’ll
end up only listening to my favourite FM broadcast station 😉
It’s
also compatible with XP, Vista , Windows 7 in 32 bit and Vista and
Windows 7
in 64 bit. Initial testing on the Mac and Ubuntu 32 and 64 bit shows
compatibility too, however I haven’t written the frequency
control application for those platforms yet.
So, no USB drivers are
required!
To keep people informed going forward, I have set up a blog
here:
http://www.funcubedongle.com/. A few
of us on the -BB may be aware of an rather prolific internal blog I’ve been
writing for the FUNcube technical team that covers 100 posts or so over the
past three months. The choice cuts of the internal blog will also appear in
the http://www.funcubedongle.com/ blog.
Also
there’s a video here of the first pre-production unit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqzTBPLqal0
Projected
availability of the first production batch of the Pro version is
December
2010. Pricing is subject to assembly costs, but to give you
indicative
pricing we are working on an initial price of the Pro version to be circa
USD150/GBP100.
73, Howard G6LVB
*Videolänk.
http://www.southgatearc.org/news/october2010/funcube_dongle.htm
*FO-29
JARL
says: It seems that the power budget of FO-29 is low.
We turned off the
analog transmitter(JTA) to confirm it on
8:19 UTC, 14 Oct 2010. We are going
to perform the next use
as follows.
16 Oct, 20:00 UTC ON, and
18
Oct, 19:55 UTC OFF
It does not limit the use of the analog system
transponder,
but please do uplink with the reasonable power. We may
cancel
the use depending on the status of the examination use.
Please
use as low power as necessary on the uplink to complete
your
communications.
JE9PEL, Mineo Wakita
En god vecka tillönskas! 73
Håkan SM7WSJ