HF Experiment Discontinued

Following a long and ultimately unsuccessful commissioning process, the CatSat team has discontinued major efforts to operate the HF/WSPR experiment onboard.

Initial tests of the system had been promising. The AstroSDR, tasked with recording data for the experiment, successfully demonstrated this capability early in the mission. The noise effects from the up-converter board, a critical device in the RF path, were measured. This showed that the instrument's systems were operating as expected, so the team moved on to the deployment of the antenna. The 2-foot whip antenna was stowed for launch into a small box on the -Z (bottom) face of the spacecraft. It was designed to passively spring out from the stowed position once the retaining door was opened, as commanded by controllers on the ground.

When this critical deployment step was commanded to the spacecraft on November 17th, 2024, the deployment system did not respond as expected and subsequent recordings showed no change in the signal received by the instrument. The team then embarked on a months-long process to determine the state of the instrument and continued attempting to release the antenna. However, these attempts were not successful. Having exhausted the available options, and faced with a limited mission lifetime, the team has decided to discontinue these efforts. The team will continue to monitor the instrument in case of a sudden and unexpected deployment, but their focus now rests on demonstration of the linear transponder mode and the inflatable antenna.