The Open Air Physics Competition (NYIFFF), held in Szigliget, Hungary, saw 12 participating teams. As a highlight exercise, the groups were tasked with decoding the Masat-1 message, directly received on-site. The numbers broadcasted in the beacon message corresponded to the positions of specific words in the (Hungarian version of the) Physicists’ March a highly popular and well known song in circles of Hungarian physics students. The sequence of the initial letters of the words yielded the solution: ‘creative physics competition’.

‘Nyílthelyi Fifikus Fizikus Feladatok‘, an annual physics competition, will be organized from April 30 to May 4, 2014. Teams from Budapest University of Technology and Eötvös University (two major universities of Hungary) will search answers to interesting experimental and theoretical physics problems. Thanks to the Masat Team, this year the competing teams will be able to receive the signal of Masat-1 and they will solve tasks using the current and past data of the satellite. One of these tasks is to decrypt a message which will be in the beacon message of Masat-1.

On 5 March 2014 at 11:36 local time the on-board computer on Masat-1 switched to it’s redundant pair; the switch was probably caused by a Single Event Latch-Up. The taks of the on-board computer are now performed by the secondary unit, which is completly identical to the primary. The sub-system and Masat-1 are operating without problems since then, so the switch was successful, the redundant system performed exceedingly.

The Google Maps is out of order because of a version update. A new version of a software module has to be integrated to fix the problem, which is not done yet because of other tasks. The fix will be released soon. Thank you for your patience.

We released a new version of the client software and a new version of the embedded firmware which can be downloaded to the Masat USB receiver. The files can be downloaded here: