TEVEL Series of Amateur Radio Satellites

TEVEL Series of Amateur Radio Satellites

I had the opportunity to work through the amateur radio transponder of TEVEL 7 a couple of times in the last few days. So I thought of learning a bit about the TEVEL series of satellites and sharing it here. There are 8 satellites in the series, built by 8 schools in different parts of Israel. All satellites will have same frequencies as follows:

Beacon: 436.400 MHz
FM Uplink: 145.970 MHz
FM Downlink: 436.400 MHz

Usually only one satellite for a footprint will be activated at a time. Activation time is available from the Twitter page of 4X1DG at https://twitter.com/DavidGr06270644. From the recent Twitter posts, I found that they are activated for a period of 72 hours with some overlap. 4X1DG has mentioned that 72 hours is a software limit that was implemented during the development phase. Some earlier posts have shown three satellites being activated at the same time. Technical problems with TEVEL 1 and 8 has been reported, which they were trying to resolve.

TEVEL satellites also function as high school students’ educational satellite and schools receive telemetry beacons for educational research activities. TEVEL satellite control station is 4X4HSC at the Herzliya Science Center, which is a ham radio club and space centre.

TEVEL satellites are CubeSats of size of 1U. One CubeSat unit is 10 x 10 x 10 cm, about the size of  Rubik’s cube. Launch was by SpaceX Falcon 9 Transporter-3 mission on January 13, 2022, from the Air Force Eastern Test Range.