Eyesat-1

Eyesat-1 is an American experimental communications microsatellite with an store-dump payload. The mission of Eyesat-1 was experimental monitoring of mobile industrial equipment. Eyesat-1 has provided the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland, with communication services to the South Pole. Eyesat-1 carries an FM repeater for Amateur Radio Research and Development Corporation (AMRAD) called AMRAD OSCAR 27 or OSCAR 27.

Eyesat-1 was launched on September 26, 1993 using an Ariane 4 rocket at Guiana Space Centre, Kourou, French Guiana, along with SPOT-3, Stella, Healthsat-2, KITSAT-2, Itamsat and PoSAT-1.

After 19 years of operation, the satellite suffered a bus failure on December 5, 2012. This failure caused the high-level software to lockup. Several years were spent trying to work around the problem, but a solution was not found.

In early 2020, the satellite was recovered by writing a new operating system in 80186 assembly that could work around the bus failure, and its FM repeater became intermittently operational.

As of 19-April-2023 AO-27 is still working.

Frequencies

 * Uplink: 145.850 MHz
 * Downlink: 436.797 MHz