UoSAT-1, also known as UoSAT-OSCAR 9 (UO-9), was a British

amateur radio satellite An amateur radio satellite is an artificial satellite built and used by amateur radio operators. It forms part of the Amateur-satellite service. These satellites use amateur radio frequency allocations to facilitate communication between amate ...

which orbited Earth. It was built at the

University of Surrey The University of Surrey is a public research university in Guildford, Surrey, England. The university received its royal charter in 1966, along with a number of other institutions following recommendations in the Robbins Report. The institut ...

and launched into

low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an orbit around Earth with a period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial objects in outer space are in LEO, with an altitude never mor ...

on 6 October 1981. It exceeded its anticipated two-year orbital lifespan by six years, having received signals on 13 October 1989, before re-entering the atmosphere. This was the first of several UoSAT satellites; followed by

UoSAT-2 UoSAT-2, which is also known as UO-11 and OSCAR-11, is a British satellite orbiting in Low Earth Orbit. The satellite functions as an amateur radio transmitter (known as an OSCAR) and was built at the University of Surrey. It launched into orbit ...

Mission

Like its successor

it carried a CCD camera and a Digitalker

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

er, and transmitted telemetry data on a 145.826 MHz beacon at 1200 baud using asynchronous

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 ...

. The ''Astrid'' package sold by British firm MM Microwave, consisting of a fixed frequency VHF receiver set and software for the

BBC Micro The British Broadcasting Corporation Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, is a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers in the 1980s for the BBC Computer Literacy Project. Designed with an emphas ...

, could display the telemetry frames from either UoSAT-1 or UoSAT-2. UoSAT-1's solar arrays were of an experimental design reused for UoSAT-2.

Computers and Data Processing

The primary computer for the satellite was the

RCA 1802 The COSMAC (Complementary Symmetry Monolithic Array Computer) is an 8-bit microprocessor family introduced by RCA. It is historically notable as the first CMOS microprocessor. The first production model was the two-chip CDP1801R and CDP1801U, w ...

microprocessor. A secondary microprocessor was also employed, the "F100L" (a Ferranti 16-bit processor). Memory was 16K of DRAM.

References

University of Surrey Amateur radio satellites Satellites of the United Kingdom Spacecraft launched in 1981 {{UK-spacecraft-stub