AMSAT Says its GOLF-TEE Initiative has Met a Major Milestone

01/21/2020

AMSAT reports that an array of GOLF-TEE (Greater Orbit Larger Footprint – Technology Evaluation Environment) satellite prototype boards transmitted telemetry for the first time on January 14.

“The boards are laid out on a bench as a ‘flat-sat,’ with interconnecting wires, bench power supplies, and a dummy load on the transmitter,” AMSAT said. The interconnected boards include an early radiation-tolerant internal housekeeping unit (IHU, i.e., computer) prototype; a control interface prototype, and a set of spare boards from HuskySat-1 that act as prototypes for the legacy IHU and legacy VHF/UHF RF components.

“Now that the development team has reached this point, it has RF to use as a basis for developing a GOLF-TEE decoder for FoxTelem, the ground telemetry receiver software,” AMSAT said. “Thousands of hours of work by many AMSAT volunteers have gone into the hardware and software that got GOLF-TEE this far, with much work yet to be done before flight units are ready.”

GOLF-TEE is designed as a low-Earth orbit testbed for technologies necessary for successful CubeSat missions to a wide variety of orbits, including medium- and high-Earth orbits. AMSAT invited donations to further the project. It’s also seeking additional volunteers. — Thanks to AMSAT News Service