Monday, February 22, 2010

Welcome to the OSCARs - Amateur Satellites

Based on the advice of a few Hams, I decided to start this Blog so that I can share my experiences along with some backgroud of the Amateur Satellites - OSCARs - Orbitting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio.

For Basic information, I decided to check up on the history of OSCAR. To my surprise, I discovered, that the first OSCAR was launched as early as 1961 - December 21st to be exact. That is just over 48 Years ago. We should be celebrating 50 years of OSCARs next year !!!!!

The first OSCAR was put into an elliptical orbit just about 150Kms going up to about 300 Kms (due to the elliptical Orbit) from the Earth's surface, just above the Earth's atmospheric layer. - This was OSCAR-1. It had a beacon on 144.983 MHz transmitting HI on Morse Code. The Tx power was 140mW from the satellite measuring 9in.x12in.x6in Tall. It lasted for all of 22 days on the air and 50 days in space before it lost altitude and burned up on entry into the atmosphere on Jan 31st 1962.

OSCAR - 1

This was/is just the beginning.

I will also post details on the basic necessitites, equipment requirements, operating procedures, etc. I also welcome questions either as comments on the blog or via direct email to vu2mud@gmail.com. Let us learn more about this interesting operation as we go along.

Information Source: http://www.spacetoday.org/Satellites/Hamsats/Hamsats1960s.html

1 comment:

  1. Keep it up Madhu. Somebody somewhere will always find your info useful.

    ReplyDelete