brainwagon

With all the pondering of satellites that I’ve been doing lately, it seems inevitable that I would have to develop some interest in rocketry. Here’s a link to get you all started down the same path: Association Of Rocket Mavericks

I decided I needed a break, so I wandered outside and caught the SO-50 pass from the parking lot using my TH-D7A and my trusty Arrow antenna. SO-50 has a reputation of being a bit finicky: I seem to always be struggling a bit with it, rotating my arrow can seem to either completely null [...]

Got stomped. Oh well. AO-51 Pass, February 23, 2008 Addendum: N3CRT tried to record it too. His recording is here.

Well, I was going to try AO-16, but as it turns out, I forgot to charge my FT-817, so I only got six minutes of receive from it. Oh well, not too bad, after all, I needed the practice tracking the Doppler. This was the first time I got audio which wasn’t complete crap. I [...]

I’m a teeny bit confused. The strong source of HF-FAX transmissions that i’ve been recording and decoding is broadcasting at night on 8.502 Mhz. I thought (based upon some link i can no longer find) that the transmissions were coming from Australia. But this website which has a list of HF-FAX transmitters suggests that it’s [...]

One of the greatest science fiction movie of all time is without doubt the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet. One of the reasons it was so successful was the oddly futuristic electronic music of Louse and Bebe Barron, true pioneers in electronic music. What’s really odd is that NASA’s latest recording of radio signals from the [...]

Worked a bit more on the code. It now sets the appropriate horizontal size and aspect ratio, and I tuned it to actually have the appropriate line length to keep the orientation straight. It still doesn’t find the sync pulse yet, but it will soon. Interestingly enough, the sound card is accurate to less than [...]

Got home, and didn’t feel like standing outside in the rain and wait for a satellite pass. But I did feel like doing something radio related. So, while sitting on the couch during Big Brother, and the first 10 minutes of a recorded episode of Boston Legal, I hacked together a simple program that did [...]

Ditch the diet soda if you’re trying to lose weight In a study to be published today, American researchers found that rats fed yogurt sweetened with zero-calorie saccharin later consumed more calories and gained more weight and body fat than rats fed yogurt sweetened with sugar. Yep, I know, this story has nothing to do [...]

On Saturday afternoon, I was tuning around with my FT-817, and heard VP6DX calling CQ on 20m SSB. He was working split, transmitting on 14.190 and listening on 14.245 (from memory, have the split frequency wrong). It turns out that he’s part of a DXpedition: a trip by a radio amateur to go to a [...]

Well, I decided to give NOAA 18 a try during a nice 18 degree pass. The resulting image was actually pretty good, although still spoiled in spots by some nasty interference (some of which sounded like a phone ringing, very odd). Still, I think this is th first image that I had that made it [...]

Several recent direct conversion receiver designs that I have been looking at use something called a Tayloe mixer. It’s an interesting way to construct a mixer. It turns out, it’s covered by a patent. Here’s a link to it. Product detector and method therefor Daniel Richard Tayloe I found the patent number while reading up [...]

Sigh. Just went out to try to work AO-51, couldn’t hear anything from the satellite, nor could I raise it. It was only after I got back inside that I remembered that the powers that be had scheduled some days where the 1.2ghz uplink was active. Sadly, that means that while passing by California, not [...]

Well, I was playing around with cocoaModem a bit more, and decided to try to decode some of the HF-FAX images sent by the station here in Point Reyes. The quality isn’t quite what I would imagine it should be, and there were a number of sync issues, so I’m not sure what’s going on [...]

Well, beneath a beautiful crescent moon and a stunning view of Orion, I set up to work AO-51 again. Sadly, on the eastern pass I suffered the usual fate of handheld users: totally dominated by users who feel that because they have more power, they don’t need to yield to others. I usually have a [...]