Martlesham 13/14-11-10

See the videos at the bottom of the page

A Developer Meeting was held at the Martlesham Microwavers Round Table weekend, at the BT site. All of the developers were there, apart from a couple who couldn’t make it for various reasons.

A general view of the 'Lab'

Below are some pictures and video of the meeting The aim was to build a ‘stack’ of the various boards which will make up FUNcube, and see if they worked! In particular we wanted to prove to ourselves that we could command the satellite remotely via RF, and look at the telemetry from the stack remotely using the FUNcube dongle. We also wanted to do things like show that we could command the antennas to deploy, as well as changing the mode of the satellite from one mode to another, eg from transponder mode to education mode, and back again.

Did we manage this – yes we did!

Wouter and David integrate the RF and PA boards.

Our two Dutch friends, Wouter Wegglaar and Gerard  Aalbers travelled over from Holland by boat, arriving at Harwich early on Saturday morning! Not only did they bring with them the newly developed RF Board, but also various test assemblies on loan from ISIS, for example an AntS simulator.

Graham and Jason watch as Duncan (sitting) uploads a command to FUNcube

Showing the PA and RF Boards, the test antennas in their jig, two test solar panels, and the ANTS

At the end of the weekend we were able to record success. The main ‘new’ PCBs that arrived were David’s PA, Wouter’s RF board, and the CCT board from Jason and his team. The other new, untested element, was of course Howard’s now famous FUNcube dongle! For more information about what happened with that, please check http://www.funcubedongle.com

Videos

Wouter showing the freshly constructed RF Board Engineering Model