AMSAT has announced that its Fox-1A satellite will launch on August 27 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 National Reconnaissance Office flight. Fox-1A will include an FM transponder with an uplink frequency of 435.180 MHz, and a downlink frequency of 145.980 MHz. The first phase of the Fox series 1-Unit CubeSats will allow simple ground stations using hand-held transceiver and simple dual-band antennas to make contacts. The Fox-1 CubeSats also will be able to transmit continuous telemetry during normal transponder operation. The satellites will feature 200 bps telemetry in the audio spectrum below 300 Hz.

AMSAT said other satellites in its Fox series will take advantage of additional launch opportunities during this year and next. The Fox-1B satellite is scheduled to fly next year with the Vanderbilt University radiation experiments. Fox-1C will launch on Spaceflight's maiden mission of the SHERPA multi-CubeSat deployer, during the 3rd quarter of 2015.

The Fox-1D satellite is a flight spare for Fox-1C, but if it is not needed there it will be ready for launch on any available open slot and be submitted in a Cubesat Launch Initiative (CSLI) proposal in 2015.

Fox-1E was built as a flight spare for Fox-1B but has been included in a student science proposal as part of the November 2014 CSLI for NASA Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa). If selected, the Fox-1B spare will fly as Fox-1E.

Managed by the Launch Services Program at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, ELaNa reaches students by introducing educational spaceflight in high schools and colleges across the US. Students are heavily involved in all aspects of the mission from developing, assembling, and testing payloads to working with NASA and the launch vehicle integration teams.

AMSAT has purchased the Fox-1C launch opportunity, which was not funded by the CSLI ELaNa program, and fundraising to cover the $125,000 cost is underway via the AMSAT-NA website and the FundRazr crowdsourcing website. — Thanks to AMSAT News Service via the Fox-1 Team