BepiColombo (Mercury mission)

BepiColombo in communication with ESA's Malargue, Argentina, earth station. It would be nice if ESA published real time details of their craft, including the earth station, frequency, data rate and signal level. Limited data is online here http://estracknow.esa.int/ I only found Bepi Colombo when I noticed Goldstone (NASA) was tracking it on 32 & 8GHz yesterday so thought it was worth a try even though it was only -131dBm on a 32m dish. Not strong, only a few dB over noise, but confirmed through tracking for an hour or more.

105.4 Mkm

32098.358MHz, 30.5GHz LO, 1.2m dish

107.2Mkm today. Better visualisation as the bandwidth I used for the last plots was too narrow for the Doppler rate (-1.94Hz/sec).

Here are the levels for the past thee days. 8/9/20 and today were not cloudy and 9/9/20 had fairly heavy looking cumulous clouds. The difference seems to be about 2.5-3dB. On the cloudy day the signal disappeared into the noise in the minima. The craft is moving away but the change in signal will be small over the 3 days.

115.1Mkm Thin clouds