Satgen121   Uosat 5 Oscar 22  In the begining  by GM4IHJ   21st July 91

Following the launch early am 17th July, I looked for the satellite at
0915 and again at 1044 ut. I got nothing useful. Then at 1235 I found the
satellite on 435.12 MHz as I returned home. It was sending 1200 bps and I
was losing it most of the time in deep fades.
At 1321 I checked Uosat 3 just to satisfy myself that my equipment was OK.
It was. Then at 1402 I picked up Uosat 5 with quite a reasonable signal
excepting that it faded completely every 6 seconds. It appeared that the
satellite spin was shading its antenna from me every 6 seconds ie it was
rotating at 10 rpm. It did not matter whether I used my simple 435/27
tunable comverter to a modified CB, or, my ICOM 451 , the former on a 48
ele multibeam, the latter on a 21 element long yagi.
Indeed because of the fading the late afternoon Arctic passes ( max el 2
degs ) were a waste of time with the signal showing on the eye diagram
only one second in ten or so. At 1853 Uosat 5 went to 9600 bps and results
began to improve. I got good DCD lock but no print out suggesting Bit
tests. But at 1858 the satellite reverted to 1200 bps.

Next day 18 July, the sat was 4 minutes ahead of the provisional Surrey
Keplerian elements. It was on 9600 bps and I got good but not perfect
passes except for the Arctic ones. In fact whenever the satellite was
north east or north of me results were generally poor. However this was
only to be expected . The satellite will take some time to achieve a
stable useful attitude.

On 19 July tracking was much easier . I had adjusted the Surrey
provisional Keps simply by altering mean motion :-
Epoch 91 198.08559029, Inc 98.5151, Mean Anomaly 281.048, Mean Motion
14.36062779, Eccentricity .00136, Arg of Perigee 114.5, and RAAN 271.465

These seem to be reasonable for timing ( on 21st ) but the satellite
appears to be a bit east of this track so RAAN will need adjustment soon.

Since then results have improved every day. So many many thanks to the
Surrey team, I look forward to several years of fun with this bird. Its
experimental picture by packet format being much more in my line than the
(to me ) rather dull pacsats.

As indicated above Uosat 5 is received here on the modified UK CB receiver
described in my Uosat 3 Operating Manual. All that is necessary is to tune
the CB starting Ch 14 ending Ch 12 on overhead passes  435.129 to 435.111
MHz , (as opposed to Uo3 Ch 9 to Ch 7 435.080 to 435.061 MHz ). A very
cheap solution to reception of a satellite which could give lots of people
a lot of pleasure.  73 de John GM4IHJ @ GB7SAN