MARMOTsat Commissioning & VHF CW Beacon

August 14th 2026

Author: Dylan Baker VA7GOY

As of July 30, 2026 MARMOTSat has successfully completed the in-orbit commissioning stage of its mission, bringing all bus systems online and into a nominal following its deployment into SSO last month. This means that the TTC, EPS, OBC and ADCS subsystems are fully functional; all four solar panels have been deployed and generating power, three axis attitude control and target (e.g. Sun) tracking works, and the NORAD ID 69912 has been identified & claimed as MARMOTSat, in addition to the ground station operations now running automatically.

Furthermore, the first of the Amateur radio payload experiments, the VHF CW Beacon, has been activated and successfully received by the MARMOTSat team at the University of Victoria, the University of New Brunswick team through their SatNOGS ground station, as well as others. The beacon at this time is sporadically active, subject to availability of electrical power, transmitting the message “CQ DE VA7UVS CO-128 QRO 2W ANT DIPOLE WWW.MARMOTSAT.CA”.

With the commissioning of the first transmitter in the Amateur-satellite service, the criteria for designating MARMOTSat as an OSCAR (Orbital Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) has also been met, and the team's request to AMSAT-NA for Canada’s first OCSAR designator was approved. MARMOTSat is now also known as Canada-OSCAR 128 (CO-128) and will shortly be featured on the AMSAT-NA satellite status reporting page. Stay tuned for more updates, the next major milestone will be the enabling of the digipeater experiment, supported by a streamlined way to communicate experiment activations to the community, likely through a social media account of some sort dedicated to MARMOTSat.