Satgen81 DOVE ECLIPSE EXPERIMENTS by GM4IHJ 15th October 90 The toughest test of any satellite occurs as it comes out of Earth shadow , back into sunlight . How quickly do the batteries recover ? Do they all recover in step ? Every evening this week , Dove will provide 2 or 3 opportunities for this experiment . Rough times ( utc ) END OF ECLIPSE are:- 15th 1815 and 1956; 16th 1928 and 2108; 17th at 1900 and 2040; 18th at 1832 and 2012 ; 19th at 1804 and 1944; 20th at 1916 and 2056 ; 21st at 1848, 2028 and 2209 , and the 22nd at 1820, 2000 and 2142 . Dove will be audible for a few minutes before these times whilst still in shadow as it comes from south to north past UK. Then it suddenly sees the Sun from its 800 km altitude as it looks over the North pole, down to the Sun which is over the equatorial Pacific ocean to the west of America. Just set up your packet station , as you would , for ordinary terrestrial usage . Tune your receiver to 145.825 MHz FM , and, you should get Dove telemetry appearing on your screen a few minutes before the above times. The following end of eclipse telemetry record,reports only telemetry boxes 10 (10v bus), 16 to 1D (8 batteries), and, 26 to 2B (the solar panels). Time 10 16 17 18 19 1A 1B 1C 1D 26 27 28 29 2A 2B 10vbus B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 B7 B8 -X +X -Y +Y -Z +Z 1909:45 D2 86 89 8C 8D 8B 76 8E 8E 01 02 01 02 01 01 Which reports low 10v bus . Battery 6 high rest low. No sun on panels 1911:17 D2 8B 8A 8A 8C 8B 77 90 8E 00 01 01 01 01 02 Not much change . Dove still in full earth shadow. 1911:27 D2 8D 8A 8C 8E 8E 7B 90 8F 01 01 02 02 02 02 No battery change but all panels seeing twighlight 1911:37 D2 8B 8A 8B 8C 8C 73 90 8E 06 00 01 1F 06 02 Fluctuation battery six, others no change. Panels seeing twighlight 1911:57 D3 90 86 88 8A 88 77 8A 86 02 4E 02 48 1A 01 10v bus improving so are batteries. Plenty of sun on +X +Y and -Z 1912:57 D4 7F 84 84 88 88 6B 8A 85 00 61 38 01 11 03 Batteries and bus improving but Battery 6 is very odd. Lots of Sun 1913:59 DC 7D 79 7C 80 7C 3D 81 7E 72 02 01 75 08 00 Sat clearly in sunlight . Bus and battery taking up normal ,sunlit levels, but battery 6 shows impossibly high volts (hex figure low =battery high ). Even this early in the life of Dove , its telemetry is showing a few readings where trouble may occur later. Battery 6 cannot be doing what its telemetry says it is . So either, the sensor, or the telemetry software in Dove is U/S . As Dove gets older these "Young Dove figures" should make an interesting comparison. Dove Operating Manual with more experiments ,will be available at the end October . Details from GM4IHJ QTHR. 73 de GM4IHJ @ GB7MAC