Happy Birthday Oscar 7 now 50 years old and still going.  Here is a nice story of the long life of one of AMSAT earliest satellite.

FROM WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMSAT-OSCAR_7

AMSAT-OSCAR 7, or AO-7, is the second Phase 2 amateur radio satellite constructed by the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (AMSAT). It was launched into Low Earth Orbit on November 15, 1974 and remained operational until a battery failure in 1981. After 21 years of apparent silence, the satellite was heard again on June 21, 2002 – 27 years after launch. At that time the public learned that the satellite had remained intermittently functional and was used surreptitiously for communication by the anticommunist opposition Fighting Solidarity during martial law in Poland.^[1]