Hello Roy!

Could you please forward this text and the .KSS file to the SEDSAT people? My 
e-mail-over-packet link does not support binary files, so the .KSS file would
be corrupted if I sent it directly.


I set up my station for capturing SEDSAT data with highest priority since 
1998-10-30. I'm located at 30 degrees south, 71 west. My equipment is a 2x16
element Yagi, a preamp having 0.45 dB noise figure, FT-736, and fully automatic 
antenna and radio tracking.

On 1998-10-30 I had 6 passes. Times were (in UTC):

14:54 to 15:06
16:41 to 16:55
18:28 to 18:42
20:15 to 20:28
22:02 to 22:15
23:51 to 00:02, 1998-10-31.

During the first two passes I heard absolutely nothing. During the third pass 
I heard two short signal bursts, but too weak to be decoded. During the fourth
pass there was one such burst. During the fifth pass there was nothing again.
But during the last pass I could hear one burst every minute, with very strong
signals (about as strong as UO-22), and they were perfectly decodable! The 
attached FOD-1030.KSS file contains the raw KISS data from this pass.

If my calculation is correct, the data I'm submitting just spans the minutes 
during which SEDSAT entered eclipse! It was captured from 23:53 to 23:59. 

The next data burst was strong too, but very short, such as if the sat had shut 
down 200 or 300 milliseconds after hitting the PTT! I cannot guarantee this, 
however, since I had the sat at only 3 degrees elevation at that moment.

I would love to be able to look at the telemetry myself, but as the telemetry
program unfortunately is WIN95-only, I cannot run it. Is a description of the 
telemetry parameters in the KISS packet available? If yes, it could be used to
easily decode the data by hand, or writing a non-WIN95 telemetry decoder. I 
would be glad to do it.

On the last of these passes SEDSAT was claiming an uptime of over 12 hours, so 
I should have been able to hear it during all of these passes! It's interesting
to see that only during the last pass, when it entered eclipse, could I decode 
it!
 
One last note: The frequency is 437914, 4 kHz higher than published.

73,
    Manfred (XQ2FOD)