Be the first to catch a signal from ESEO

It is time to prepare to listen to space. To celebrate the launch of the European Student Earth Orbiter (ESEO), ESA’s Education Office challenges the amateur radio community to listen out to be first to hear the new spacecraft orbiting Earth.

ESEO will be launched today, 3 December 2018, from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, as part of the Spaceflight’s SSO-A rideshare launch; spacecraft separation and activation is scheduled at about 2 hours 13 minutes after launch.

About two minutes after being deployed into its final orbit, ESEO will begin transmitting with its beacon signals to Earth that can be picked up by anyone with common amateur radio equipment. ESA challenges anyone to send to eseo@esa.int the recording of the signal of the 437.00 MHz signal received from ESEO during its pass in visibility of their ground station.

SIX SHIRTS, FROM ESEO TO THE WORLD!

For one week after the ESEO launch, the first email coming from each continent (America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Antartica), sent by radio-amateurs who recorded the signals received from ESEO, for which the signal recorded is confirmed to belong to ESEO, will be awarded an official ESA Education shirt of the ESEO mission.

More information about ESEO can be found here.

ESEO was launched on 3 December 2018, 19:34 CET.

You can find the TLEs here.

ESEO UHF Beacon Information:

Frequency: 437.00 MHz

Transmission Format: See attachment 1

Modulation Format: GFSK

Beacon schedule:

Every 1 minute when in safe mode and just after deployment during the de-tumbling phase
Every 1 minutes when in sunlight
Every 5 minutes when in eclipse

Beacon Types (transmitted cyclically):

General
Power System
OBDH
AOCS and sensor/actuator
FDIR and TMTC
Payload

Additional beacon (not in nominal rotation): Emergency

Telemetry equations: See attachment 2

Destination Address is: ESEO

Source Address is: IW4DUL

The following information is stored in every packet sent from the spacecraft in the Address part of the message, as per AX.25 protocol.

First Byte
Destination Address Subfield	Source Address Subfield
A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A7	A8 A9 A10 A11 A12 A13 A14

Byte	ASCII	Bin Data MSB LSB	Hex Data
A1	E	10001010	8A
A2	S	10100110	A6
A3	E	10001010	8A
A4	O	10011110	9E
A5	Space	01000000	40
A6	Space	01000000	40
A7	SSID	01100000	60
A8	I	10010010	92
A9	W	10101110	AE
A10	4	01101000	68
A11	D	10001000	88
A12	U	10101010	AA
A13	L	10011000	98
A14	SSID	01100001	61

What your email should contain:

An IQ recording in a recognised format
Your Name
Your Callsign (if any!)
Snailmail address for delivery of your polo shirt
Reception time of the beacon
Details of any telemetry decoded
Your Location
A few lines about your equipment

*Attachements will be uploaded latest on Monday, 19th November 2018.