The UoSAT-2 digital communications experiment

The Digital Communications Experiment (DCE) in orbit on the UoSAT-2 satellite was designed to gain flight experience with the hardware and software necessary to operate a store-and-forward communications service from a satellite in low-Earth orbit. Since its commissioning in early 1986, the DCE has been used to relay up to 30 pages of information per day among groundstations in the USA and the UK; the Amateur Radio Service uses the DCE to relay messages among Local Area Packet-radio Networks. The DCE is also running an electronic mail system designed to interact with one user at a time.