Satgen331 Satellite Archeology Pt1 by GM4IHJ 29 July 95 Every once in a while, a report arrives suggesting that someone somewhere has heard Radiosport 1 ( 78100B). This satellite was one of a pair with Radiosport 2 (78100C), which separated at launch and went into 82.5 degree inclination orbits with periods of a little over 2 hours. These orbits put them far higher than todays LEO satellites. Up around 1700 kms altitude RS1 and 2 are as we now know subject to serious radiation bombardment . So no satellites go that high these days. But up there for a few short weeks they gave excellent 2m up 10m down transponder communication between places as far apart as UK and California. Their transponder life was short,but for some reason the beacon of one of them kept on going for years , slowly losing coherence and eventually send meaningless garbled CW telemetry on 29.401 MHz. Even today , there are occassional reports that someone has heard it. What credence should we give to these reports. Has RS1 become the Flying Dutchman of space , doomed to orbit the earth for ever , talking only to itself ? When last competently reported, the reduction of supply voltage had upset the rhythm of the satellites telemetry. Since then a variety of reports have come in but they all lack an adequate description of what was heard - Eg DateTime, Frequency, Doppler, Duration, Azimuth, Signal strength, tone and telemetry content. So at this time the verdict has to be "Not Proven" This need for proper reporting is vital if amateurs are to get credit for rediscover of old satellites. 41 amateur satellites have gone into space and only about 4 of them have re entered the atmosphere. So there should be plenty of scope for satellite archeology . Even if the transmitters have failed because of loss of supply voltage , there may just be enough juice to activate the satellite receiver local oscillator , and that may be audible on a big EME array. Equally possible . Many of the old Amsat birds and several hundred old commercial and military birds should be visible in the pre dawn and post sunset skies. NORAD is still tracking them , and Keplerian elements are available. So perhaps we can look in on old OSCAR 7 of fond memory, now and again if we want to do so. PS... The first two commercial store and forward LEO sats ORBCOMM 1 (95017A) and ORBCOMM 2 (95017B) have started operating. Problems which prevented operation immediately after launch appear to have been solved. It will be very interesting to see how these satellites perform in comparison with the well established, Amateur pacsats , uosats and, their more recent clones.