CAMSAT has announced that the CAMSAT CAS-6 amateur radio payload launched successfully on December 20, piggybacked on a TIANQIN-1 technology test satellite.

“The satellite is currently in orbital testing,” CAMSAT’s Alan Kung, BA1DU, told ARRL on December 20. “The amateur radio payload is expected to be operational in about 3 days.”

The microsatellite will be known as CAS-6/TIANQIN-1, and the call sign is BJ1SO. The primary launch payload is the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite, CBERS-4A. CAS-6 is in a sun-synchronous orbit with an apogee of 390 miles. It carries a U/V linear transponder, with a downlink of 145.925, 20 kHz passband (inverted) and an uplink of 435.28 MHz. The CW telemetry beacon is on 145.910 MHz, while 4k9 baud GMSK telemetry will be transmitted on 145.890 MHz. CAMSAT has provided CAS-6 Satellite Digital Telemetry Description and CW Telemetry Beacon Encoding Format documents. — Thanks to Alan Kung, BA1DU