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Over the last couple of weeks successfully arraying the @NASAVoyager 1 on two 34 Meter antenna has become a challenge,we are seeing small signal fluctuations with the spacecraft signal, enough for telemetry to regularly drop lock. Possibly a pitch and yaw issue with the AACS?
pic.twitter.com/gCPHp8hDUv
Now that the issue has been identified project will be hard at work looking for a solution. Unfortunately fluctuations of 2db when you only have a 1db margin will always end up with telemetry loss. Its believed the pointing of the HGA could have wandered off earth point slightly
Could this be due to the 34-meter antenna deformation problem I have been hearing about?
I didn't think we had one but no, the downlink characteristics were also seen on the 70M antennas. We didn't catch it straight away because having the bigger link margin data quality was still good.
How frequent are the drops?
Probably every half hour or so, but it wasn't cyclic which made it hard to characterise
How do you calibrate the phase of the 2 arrayed antennas ?
We don't have to calibrate, the system aligns the IF inputs in the time domain in real time and then combines. At this point its all digital using FSRs
Should we be worried?
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