brainwagon

Well, by the time I got home tonight, there was going to only be a single low pass of the Yubileiny satellite to the west out over the Pacific ocean, but I decided to give it a try anyway. It’s maximum altitude for this pass was about 16 degrees. I started this recording pretty much at AOS, but didn’t start receiving until the satellite cleared about 4 degrees. Not bad really: my horizons are pretty high here. I tracked it on 435.315, and switched over a couple of times to see if it was sending on 435.215, which has also been mentioned on the amsat-bb mailing list. No dice.

But I did get a chance to try out my super simple Doppler tracking program. I have a satellite prediction library written in Python, so I coded up a simple Python script to track a particular satellite, and automatically send Doppler corrections out a serial port to my FT-817 so that it should update the frequency every five seconds or so. As you listen, you’ll hear the Doppler going down, and then the radio tunes and the frequency of the received signal hops back up. I was using the elements for OBJECT A as they were posted to the amsat list, which matched pretty well: I didn’t twiddle with any offsets throughout the pass.

Anywho… here’s the recording (faint for the first minute or two, but then picks up):

RS30, Yubileiny, recorded on May 27, 2008