To ALL,

UoSAT-5's back after a night of ticking as you'll have heard.

So what is this ticking? I've seen several people asking the question,
and as I wrote this ticking program, I'll try to explain.

When the OBC is rebooted it reverts to its low level 'bootloader'. This
is used to load the first layer of software which consists of the OBC's
'Kernal' and the 'Loader'.

When these programs are started, the OBC can be loaded very quickly.
During the loading process, the Loader can produce diagnostic information
in the form of 'Ticks'.

When you see the OBC ticking, it's being loaded or waiting to be loaded.
The information in the tick messages will change as loading progressed
and you can tell this mostly from the first letter following the word
'Tick':

	'G' First stage of loading, called 'Ghost' version.
	'N' Second stage of loading, called 'Non-AX25' version.
	'Q' Final stage of loading, called 'AX25' version.

When the OBC seems to 'come to life' after a reload, loading is actually
not finished because several tasks still need to be loaded, but the minimal
system for the store and forward is running, allowing PB to be used. Later
when all the tasks are running, they produce the normal status messages you
see on the PB message screen.

So, watch for those Ticks! If it's all as clear as mud, ask me again.

73s
Marcel, G1NBR, UoSAT.

PS. The reason for the reload was to eliminate some bugs we found and move
to a 'Version Controlled' version (!?).