The Spartan Packet Radio Experiment (SPRE) was an Amateur Radio communications experiment that flew on the
Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle is a retired, partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. Its official program ...
''
Endeavour''s
STS-72 mission as part of
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...
's Spartan/OAST-Flyer spacecraft in January 1996. The experiment was intended to test the tracking of satellites via amateur packet radio (
Automatic Packet Reporting System
Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) is an amateur radio-based system for real time digital communications of information of immediate value in the local area. Data can include object Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates, weather st ...
), and was designed and built by the
Amateur Radio Association at the
University of Maryland
The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of M ...
(W3EAX).
[http://www.amsat.org/amsat/ftp/news/1995/ans343.txt ] Required
GPS
The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite sy ...
data for the experiment was provided by another portion of
the Spartan payload.
The operating mode was
FM,
AFSK
Frequency-shift keying (FSK) is a frequency modulation scheme in which digital information is transmitted through discrete frequency changes of a carrier signal. The technology is used for communication systems such as telemetry, weather ball ...
1200
baud packet radio, transmitted at 145.550 MHz.
[http://www.hamradio-online.com/1995/nov-dec/spartan.html]
References
External links
*
*
Packet radio
Global Positioning System
Space Shuttle program
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