Tracking Swayam Satellite

Swayam is satellite initiative of College of Engineering,Pune which was launched by ISRO on PSLV-C34 Launch Vehicle from Sriharikota,India along with 19 other satellites.

Swayam had a overhead pass over Atharva Satellite Ground Station on Sunday 26th June 2016 at 21:50. The link setup for this includes a handheld yagi antenna and Kenwood TMV71A
The team developed a unique type of single plane yagi made up of Wood Boom and aluminium rods as elements. This design was simulated on 4NEC2 had an advantage of being lightweight. It was mounted on a pivoted stand and moved around manually. This handheld type yagi had a gain of 14dB and had 9 elements for frequency of 437 Mhz. The fabrication and design was done solely by members of atharva satellite ground station.

The beacon signal was in form of CW morse code and was recorded on kenwood tmv71a transceiver. The recording of the same you can listen to here: Swayam Beacon

This gives us the assurance of proper working of the complete link and antennas. The team is now planning to track many such satellites in near future.