ROBUSTA 3A Satellite

Improve the accuracy of weather forecasts around the Mediterranean basin.

• Méditerranée scientific mission in partnership with Météo France to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts around the Mediterranean basin and in particular the forecast of the Cévenol episodes;
• A humanitarian mission in partnership with associations to provide a means of communication between schools located in Burkina Faso in cut-off areas of networks and partner schools in France;
• An engineering mission that will test and qualify an on-board equipment, the Star Tracker, a system of attitude determination in space.

ROBUSTA-3A missions are:

1. RadioHam: Store & forward repeater, refer to 5.5 paragraph for more details.
2. Educational: No less than 300 students participated in the development of the platform. As part of their training, a module is allocated to the initiation to amateur radio. In addition, we pass the license to around ten students each year with the ANFR (French administration) and 3 new operators at CSUM.
3. Technical validation mission: An S-band transmitter is on board operating in commercial band for test purposes. This payload will not be controlled by the amateur radio band.

The HAM radio messaging system provides a message-exchanging service between amateur radio users using Robusta satellite missions as relays. The main purpose of the system is to enable HAM radio operators to send and receive messages from anywhere in the world without having a direct (end-to-end) connection between them. The messaging system uses a method called ‘store and forward’ to provide this service. Messages are transported to the relay station (satellite) by a radio link, and from one geographical location to another, by the satellite orbital movement. A user sends a message to the satellite during a pass and the message is stored in the satellite’s memory. The satellite then moves on its orbit, making the stored message available for other HAM radio operators. Users can request messages to the satellite which, in turn will check if there are any stored messages available for that particular operator. Finally, the message is transmitted and it arrives at its destination. Proposing a UHF downlink using 9k6 GMSK with AX25. 

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