As part of making space accessible to Western Australians, Binar satellites’ communications with the ground operate on a part of the radio spectrum that anyone can access.
That means anyone with the right equipment can receive data from Binar satellites, and anyone who also has the right licenses can transmit to them.
In space
Binar-2, 3 and 4 were deployed into orbit from JAXA’S Kibo module on the International Space Station at 7:20PM AWST on Thursday, August 29th, 2024, and each had beacons on board transmitting on amateur frequencies every 15 seconds. The operations phase of the mission has now come to an end, and all 3 CubeSats have now burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
The frequencies that Binar-2, 3 and 4 were transmitting on were:
Anyone was able to download and decode data from the satellite, including telemetry data from the satellite itself, and payload data from onboard experiments.
On Earth
In addition to making Binar available to existing radio users, we’re also investing in making radio accessible to more people.
We’re facilitating amateur radio ground stations in schools through BinarX, and improving access to space for everyone by expanding the open-source SatNOGS network.
Binar-2, 3 & 4 now have active pages in the SatNOGS database, which includes observations made of our satellites by SatNOGS ground stations around the world!
As part of the program, students and teachers can construct and operate their own SatNOGS ground station to better understand radio communications and contribute back to the SatNOGS community.
In the community
Our radio operators are fully licensed by ACMA and are active participants in the amateur satellite community.
During the Binar-1 mission we relied heavily on the amateur community to track and troubleshoot our satellite beacon. Unfortunately, for technical reasons we were unable to make further systems on the satellite available to the community.
We were so grateful to see the community engage with more complete functionality on Binar-2, 3 & 4 and look forward to continuing this on future Binar missions. If you’d like to help shape the future of Binar in the amateur radio community, get in touch!