FUNcube-1 (AO-73), Educational Amateur Radio Satellite

FUNcube-1 (AO-73), Educational Amateur Radio Satellite

FUNcube-1 is part of the FUNcube family of satellites, which also includes JY1SAT or JO-97 and Nayif-1 or EO88. It is a 1U cubesat with a dimension of 10cm x 10cm x 10cm.  FUNcube-1 was developed by a team of volunteers from AMSAT-UK and AMSAT-NL at ISISPACE facility. It has an orbit of around 600 km altitude and had multiple functions like telemetry and an inverting linear transponder for SSB/CW with a bandwidth of 20 kHz. It was an U/V transponder with uplink on 435.150 – 435.130 MHz and downlink on 145.950 – 145.970 MHz. The original schedule was that it would have 30 mW telemetry during eclipse and 300 mW telemetry when illuminated, on 145.935 MHz. The linear transponder was scheduled to work during eclipse. Eclipse is the period during which satellite does not receive sunlight while moving around the earth.

FUNcube-1 launched in Novemeber 2013 is nearing its 10th Anniversary in orbit. As it experienced many months of continuous sunlight over a couple of years, onboard temperature rose to around 30 degrees Centigrade. Temperature related problem is thought to be the reason why its batteries are not charging well this year. Maximum power consumption would have also occurred due to continuous high power telemetry as per schedule during illuminated time. When I checked the AMSAT Live OSCAR Satellite Status Page for the activity of AO-73, there are intermittent reports of Telemetry/Beacon being active. But there are no reports that the voice transponder is active now. More than 10 million data packets had been received by November 2022 by ground stations and forwarded to the FUNcube Data Warehouse. I was happy to see 8 VU hams listed on their online leaderboard today, many of them current members of our LEO Satellite Repeater Contact Group!