MEMESat-1: Memes Beamed from Space
An Anonymous Coward writes:
The Mission for Education and Multimedia Engagement Satellite (MEMESat-1) is planned to be the first meme broadcasting cube satellite ever created. MEMESAT-1 is being developed by letsgo2space.com, a non-profit trying to increase the exposure kids have to STEM topics.
At the moment, the team hopes to launch the satellite by late 2021, and no later than Spring 2022. The satellite will be a cubesat with flash memory containing thousands of meme images that will be broadcast to Earth via a transmitter operating in the UHF 70cm radio band. Enthusiasts on the ground will be able to receive the meme images with a Yagi antenna and we anticipate that RTL-SDRs will be a commonly used receiver. The satellite will also contain an FM UHF/VHF repeater operating in the amateur radio band for ham radio use.
Currently letsgo2space is fundraising and looking for $30,000 to fund the launch of MEMESAT-1. You can either donate any amount or submit a meme for their broadcast database for $1.69 via their website.
For non-radioheads, the 70cm band refers to the 433MHz frequency band normally used for industrial, scientific and medical devices. You should be able to pick up the signal with any UHF digital terrestrial television antenna and decode it with a Software Defined Radio receiver (Realtek RTL2832U clones being the most common due to its low cost) and gnuradio on a PC.
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