Well, during a road trip with my wife to San Diego and back, I managed to begin to type up my notes for an upcoming tutorial article (cross fingers) on reception and decoding of weather satellite imagery. I basically reimplemented what I had, stripping it down to its barest essence, and trying to make [...]
I got some time today waiting for the furnace guys to show up (they never did) and managed to figure out a few of the things that were wrong with the image normalization code and with the sync detection code. Here’s the latest automatically generated image from one of the recordings I made [...]
It’ll be apparent what’s going on halfway through the song.
Okay, I admit it. I have a special place in my heart for The Incredibles. It was my first opportunity to work for Brad Bird. I worked with a lot of really great people, many of whom I went on to work with again during Ratatouille, and let’s face it: I just [...]
Not getting your daily geek on? Try the PDP-1 playing a Christmas Carol Medley.
Via PDP-1 Music
I’m sitting up in bed, laptop buzzing away, with my wife sleeping next to me. Within the next hour, we’ll have showers taken, coffee brewing, and begin opening presents. I didn’t get the house cleaned as much as I would like and my wife’s Jeep still needs its wiper arm replaced (did [...]
Okay, I know I’m going overboard on this whole amateur radio kick I’ve been on, but with all the satellite stuff I’ve been dinking with, I couldn’t resist.
NORAD tracks Santa.
Okay, I was bored waiting for potential Ande passes, so I tuned into Genesat. I got a few telemetry packets, although the frequency seemed to be 5khz low from the published frequency of 437.075Mhz.
KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.orgB4511B0A00000000000000260069009F7113722166CC790B02F0
KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.orgFA511B06000000000001002600690001EA02BA27081CBF026621
KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.org04521B8A010E018901DD010100A4015F2DCB1C226D951D1C023A
KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.org36521B73010F017101DE010000A4019F992216023D996D22E207
KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.org3B521B72010F016E01DE010000A4015F2DCB1C226D951D1C023A
KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.org40521B0100000001000100250069005F2299221C02202274231C
KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.org45521B0200000002000000260069009F07BC13A0230013281C02
Not sure what any of it means, but there it goes.
Around 21:53Z, I got two packets for the NO-61, otherwise known as ANDE
ANDE-1>BEACON:T#002,002,010,009,004,003,01000000,000
ANDE-1>APRS2,SGATE::BLN2ANDE :ANDE stays awake for 30 secs after last pkt heard.
Ande is due to deorbit very soon, probably within the next 24 hours, maybe even sooner. My orbital elements indicated its altitude was only about 107 miles, and it’s dropping fast. [...]
During the SO-50 pass this morning, WA8SME was asking if I was using a preamp, and whether I had any difficulty with receive sensitivity. On the Amsat mailing list, I’m amazed by reports of people who get weak signal strength using 14 element antennsas and the like, my handheld Arrow antenna, while not perfect, [...]
Google Maps for mobile phones apparently has a new feature that enables you to automatically determine your position by triangulating your location from cell towers (much like the Navizon client does). This is very cool! Unfortunately, you can’t update the google maps application on the iphone, so I can’t tell how well it [...]
I managed to work WD9EWK from my car using only my Kenwood HT and the omnidirectional whip mounted on the roof of my SUV. I didn’t have my voice recorder with me, so I didn’t get a recording though. Obviously using an omni antenna picks up a lot of signals and intermodulation distortion: [...]
While discussing my experiments with weather satellite reception, I talked about how I made my recordings using the “WFM” or wide FM settings on my Radio Shack Pro 60 scanner. If you read up on this subject, you’ll find that the signals transmitted by these satellites have about a 50khz bandwidth. The normal [...]
It was positively chatty on the westward pass of AO-51 this morning. For fun, I reduced power to just 1w on my HT, and nobody seemed to notice, although it did get scratchy at the end of the pass.
Dec 16 pass of AO-51, 8:57 Local Time
The beginning of the pass is a little noisy, [...]
More interesting reading, from Tom Clark on the AMSAT mailing list.
