PCSAT2 Day 1 Summary: 4 August 2005 ------------------------------------------------------------- Day one for PCSAT2 deployment was an amazing exercise since our Naval Academy ground station and all web pages were down, dark and hot throughtout the on-orbit installation and activation. This was due to a LONG planned building power outage to move the AC Power System onto the roof from its 16 foot below sea level location which was totally flooded during Isabel 2 years ago. We ran our radios and 7 laptops and one lamp in a sweltering dark building (outside temps in the mid-90's) without HVAC for 4 days via a very long extension cord from another building. Not only our web pages were down, but we only had Email via a wireless lan to a laptop. Fortunately we had a special telephone rigged and were able to stay on a round-the-world teleconference call with our other ground stations. After Deployment, PCSAT2 minimum operating commands were established by USNA ground station on a lucky 2 deg last-pass of the day. But the short access did not allow initializing the FTSCE solar cell experiment. Without another pass for 14 hours, we spent the next 24 hours on a continuous telcon with our backup command stations making incremental progress in activating the FTSCE experiment. FTSCE was activated 7 hours later by our NZ station but poor downlinks over 6 more passes yielded little meaningful FTSCE data. After 14 hours or so, on USNA's first pass of the new day,we did get 44 of 54 data lines and subsequent passes yielded similar results on the next 6 USNA passes. By mid-day, the automatic WEB page telemetry was beginning to work and ALOGGER data collection was working very well from SOuth Africa and the western USA. Battery voltage remained nominal at 14 volts and peak charge as high as 1.5 amps out of a possible 1.8 amps were observed even at this 25 or so degree beta angle. Once FTSCE data was flowing, we activated and tested the PSK-31 transponder and voice repeater. Both were nominal. On the 1755z pass the PSK-31 transponder was left on for a whole orbit and the fail-safe timer properly reduced the duty cycle to 50%. We successfully turned it off on the last 1930z pass for the day. Final settings were also made to reduce telemetry from 10 sec to 20 sec in order to halve the TX power used over the next 14 hours of no access. Also telemetry was reduced to only the 1200 baud set and not the 9600 baud courtesy copy. The FTSCE beacon was left on. NASA Glen also was getting good data by the end of the day and was satisfied with the quantity to allow analysis. Overall, no system anomolies were observed. All voltages and currents were nominal. Temperatures did decay from about 10C initially down to about 4C over the 32 hour period. Most stations did observe better signals during the first half of most passes probably due to ISS attitude and PCSAT2 blockage. Also the decision was made at JSC that PCSAT2 would not have to be shut down on every EVA or arm operations, but only if operations were within 14 meters of our antennas. After more than 36 hours of continuous operation at USNA operations on PCSAT2 were secured and efforts shifted to ANDE final integration items that are due on Friday at NRL. Many thanks to our volunteers in CA, NZ, AUS, and the UK who remained on-line with us for more than 24 hours until initial operations were nominal. Also thanks to the Telemetry and APRS web-master volunteers, software authors and amateur radio volunteer ground stations who made the global data collection effort possible. Postscript. A note about PCSAT2 was posted on a popular news group called slashdot and "In terms of the numbers, there were about 40,000 extra visits and over a million extra hits in the last 18 hours..." We have no data on our own USNA actual PCSAT2 web pages since the entire building was down as well as our web pages, HVAC and power. The entire USNA PCSAT2 initial operations and checkouit was conducted on emergency power over 3 days on one 15 amp emergency circuit with one lamp, a few flashlights, radios and 7 laptops. Many thanks to the USNA infrastructure technicians that made sure we had the power circuit, telephone and a wireless LAN into one laptop. Bob Bruninga USNA Satellite Lab