Daily Archives: 2/22/2009

Grabber update…

Earlier, I noted that W8LIW was getting signals simultaneously from both Europe and Australia, so I was hoping that as the earth spun around, I might get some good DX signals. Thusfar, the only one I’m getting is Vern’s Big Ears beacon from Nova Scotia, right down along the bottom (repeating VDM).

Oh, and I’ve got my grabber pretty much running well at http://qrss.info. I just added the frequency legend on the right. It should go pretty well for the next couple of hours, then falls off during the night, until about midnight when Australia and Japan usually begin to wake up.

capturecgi

Earlier, I blogged about the collision between Iridium 33 and the defunct COSMOS 2251 satellite. Today, I noticed that Celestrak had orbital elements for 134 fragments resulting from the collision. I was curious what the resulting pattern would look like, so I wrote a bit of code to suck them all in and plot them on a map. Here’s what I got for a particular moment around noon local time.

debris

The labeled points are the tracked location of the main body of the satellite. There are orbital elements for 48 additional fragments of Iridium, and 84 additional fragments of COSMOS. The main body of Iridium 33 was at 785km altitude, while Cosmos is down around 771km. Debris is scattered over quite a wide variety of altitudes, from a low of 284km to a high of 1158km.

Unusual WSPR spot

This morning I was surprised by two WSPR spots from a callsign reported as BY3AKL1X, located in grid OM89ua. If you look it up on the map, you’ll find it’s Tanggu Park, near Tianjin China. I was confused, but then realized that this was the call of KL1X, who (as pointed out to me by KC0KNM) lists that he is operating receive only from Tanggu Park since the beginning of this year (as listed on his QRZ page). Neat!

Some overnight spots…

Okay, this is getting kind of repetitive, so I’ll try to reduce this to its bare minimum. Got quie a few WSPR spots from VK6DI overnight.

Timestamp Call MHz SNR Drift Grid Pwr Reporter RGrid km az
 2009-02-22 11:16   K6HX   10.140133   -26   0   CM87ux   2   VK6DI   OF88cd   14725   259 
 2009-02-22 11:04   K6HX   10.140133   -26   0   CM87ux   2   VK6DI   OF88cd   14725   259 
 2009-02-22 10:52   K6HX   10.140133   -26   0   CM87ux   2   VK6DI   OF88cd   14725   259 
 2009-02-22 10:40   K6HX   10.140133   -28   0   CM87ux   2   VK6DI   OF88cd   14725   259 
 2009-02-22 10:28   K6HX   10.140133   -26   0   CM87ux   2   VK6DI   OF88cd   14725   259 
 2009-02-22 10:16   K6HX   10.140133   -28   0   CM87ux   2   VK6DI   OF88cd   14725   259 
 2009-02-22 09:40   K6HX   10.140133   -24   0   CM87ux   2   VK6DI   OF88cd   14725   259 
 2009-02-22 09:28   K6HX   10.140133   -24   0   CM87ux   2   VK6DI   OF88cd   14725   259 
 2009-02-22 01:04   K6HX   10.140133   -25   0   CM87ux   2   VK6DI   OF88cd   14725   259 
 2009-02-22 00:52   K6HX   10.140133   -23   0   CM87ux   2   VK6DI   OF88cd   14725   259 
 2009-02-22 00:40   K6HX   10.140133   -23   0   CM87ux   2   VK6DI   OF88cd   14725   259 

Fairly weak, my 2w was barely getting in. Oddly, I saw no trace of VK6DI until 12:55 or so UTC, where he came in pretty nicely.

vk6di1

I also had VK2ZAY in there a bit (he seems a bit easier to get than VK6DI). I’m wondering if simultaneous reception of both of these VK hams is more rare than you would think: I’ve only seen it once. Last night, VK2ZAY was fading as VK6DI began to climb up. Of the two VK2ZAY appears easier, indeed, Alan, VA3STL, reported that he had seen VK2ZAY overnight. I also had an interesting spot of W1BW’s flying W beacon in some early morning propagation. As WADJJ and WA0UWH are coming in this morning, I got this screen grab right around 14:55 UTC:

scr00245

Addendum:: Chris, WB5FKC captured this screen which he sent me. It shows my Hellschreiber beacon, W1BW’s flying W, and I think Vern, VE1VDM’s beacon at the bottom.

wb5fkc