I haven’t had the time to record some of the NOAA17 passes during the day, but once night falls, I’ve managed to record a few passes. Tonight, I decided not to use my Yaesu VX-3R, but instead tried to record the pass from my old Radio Shack PRO60 scanner. While I recorded a [...]
Lest you all think I’m merely a robotic automata without any sense of sentimentality or soul, I present the following. Thanks Alex for the link.
A bit of image processing with gimp yielded the following on a night time pass. It wasn’t particularly good with respect to noise: on the night passes the contrast is pretty low , so you get difficulties when you try to extract good images. Still, I’m not displeased…
I was monitoring a routine pass of AO-51 this morning, just listening to some rag chewing, not really diving in myself, until we heard XF4YW calling. One of the regulars identified him as a rare DX, so we all tried to work him from DK48. I had no idea where DK48 was, [...]
Lots and lots of good information, rather Euro-centric (they seem to have lots more fun with satellites than we do here in the states) but I’m impressed by the depth and breadth of the information contained therein. Found it while searching for information about a helical cavity filter.
Weather Satellites
Addendum: You can read about the [...]
Well, I’ve been experimenting a bit more with some weather satellite reception, and on the off chance that anyone cares, I thought I’d write down some of what I learned. Last night (after dark) I decided to record an NOAA-17 pass. This time, I used my Yaesu VX-3R, which has a wideband [...]
Okay, this isn’t that impressive, but let me explain.
Larger version of the same…
I recorded about 4.5 minutes of audio from one of the weather satellites, using my small pocket recorder and a Kenwood TH-D7A. In most respects, I shouldn’t expect anything good to happen. I’m using a cheap little voice recorder. I’m [...]
Terminal node controllers are the “classic” approach to doing packet radio. They are basically dedicated modems that are used to implement a set of features that allow you to send and receive AX.25 formatted frames over amateur radio. The thing is: they are getting harder to find. My TH-D7a has a fairly [...]
I mostly just wander out and wave my antenna around when I work satellites. Someday, I might want an automated system, and this can be built for less than a hundred bucks with stuff you can get from Radio Shack. Worth archiving.
A PRACTICAL ROTATOR SYSTEM (APRS)®
With all the satellite mucking around I’ve been doing, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of building a little setup to receive weather satellite information directly from the weather satellites that are in polar orbit. They broadcast mostly around 137Mhz, and use an AM modulated subcarrier to send information via FM. I haven’t got [...]
From the Beer, Coffee, and a little DSP » Blog Archive » Asterisk on an FPGA
Over the past couple of years a few people have suggested running Asterisk on an FPGA using an embedded processor core. I must admit I had always assumed that the processor would be too slow to be useful, certainly [...]
Try reading some of this drivel.
Rebel Science News
I was experimenting with APRS messaging via GO-32 this morning, after being simply overrun by Mexican hams earlier in the morning on AO-51. W7KKE runs a GO-32 SatGate in Lincoln City, Oregon (a place I’ve visited many times) and was apparently listening when I messaged him this morning via my TH-D7. I wasn’t [...]
In about a month, the ANDE satellite (otherwise known as NO-61) will deorbit. Last night I was out hunting for it, and heard a single AFSK packet which didn’t decode properly. It’s pretty hard to bounce something off it since it only wakes up for 1s out of ever 15s looking for [...]
I looked at oscar.dcarr.org, and noted that the ISS packet radio feed appeared to be back up. We had a 15 degree pass to the west (the most favorable direction, toward the east I have a S5 noise source), so I went out and waved my antenna around, and got the following packets digipeated:
From [...]
