by g3vzv » Sat Dec 07, 2013 8:39 pm
From: Ted Pepper
Sent: Friday, December 06, 2013 9:06 PM
To: Graham Shirville
Subject: A Successful School Demo
Hi Graham,
This message is just to let you know, that I had a successful day at Someries Junior School, Luton on Friday 6th December 2013. I set-up a PC, dongle and Turnstile antenna early in the morning and ran the Dashboard on my PC, which also displayed a frequency spectrum and waterfall, using SDRSharp. FUNcube-1 was tracked with Orbitron on a separate monitor and a second PC displayed the Warehouse. I was early enough to catch and upload 4 frames on a pass of about 15 degrees at 9.45 am, which showed me that the system was working. About 10 minutes before the 69 degree pass, that was predicted for 11.16, a helpful computer technician noticed that my PC was running on batteries and the charge was about to run out! The 13 amp power supply plug for the computer had not been pushed home firmly enough. This was quickly remedied and disaster avoided.
The children from the Science Club, the Head, and others gathered around the set-up at 11.15, watched the arrival of the satellite on Orbitron, and saw and heard the strengthening signals on SDRSharp. One child was assigned to call-out the numbers of collected frames as they showed-up on the Dashboard and another called out my call-sign, each time it appeared on the Warehouse display. Thirty-two frames were uploaded.
When the pass was over I spent a few minutes displaying some of the graphs and explaining a little of the data, before the children returned to their regular classes. All enjoyed the demonstration and I was relieved that it was successful.
Kind regards,
Ted G3YWA