From course activities to space flight communications

The FRAM2 mission, from 1-4 April 2025, included an open amateur radio challenge in which participants would send images of Earth taken from their polar orbit during scheduled sessions.

UNIS do not have dedicated antennas for satellite communication. However, we constructed an antenna in 2023, built by autumn Bachelor course students atbAGF-223 for their CanSat project.

Our observatory engineer, Mikko Syrjäsuo, deployed this antenna at the Kjell Henriksen Observatory for a quick test during the FRAM2 mission.

The ground-station antenna built for CanSat flights of the course successfully heard the transmissions from FRAM2. The received radio signals from three different overpasses were converted into images, which revealed, among other things, parts of the west coast of Svalbard as seen from space.

Well done AGF-223 students!

Arctic Geophysics

Courses

Research

CanSats, Drones, and Spectacular Views

Lisa Baddeley is a professor in Space physics – radar applications at UNIS, and for many years, she led the field work AGF-223 at Breinosa. Now, she wants to say hello to her colleagues taking over the lecturing, and I and Walter, the dog, are lucky to tag along.

Research

UNIS /News /From course activities to space flight communications