brainwagon

Here’s another NOAA 17 pass, recorded on a bright and sunny Saturday morning. I tried a bit of a different setup this morning: I was using a small preamp between my Yagi and my trusty rusty Pro-60 scanner. As you can see, an otherwise gorgeous 86 degree pass was spoiled by some interference. Can anyone […]

It now can put out ground tracks as well as more detailed tracking information. Just a few more lines of code. ARISS will be visible from grid CM87ux starting in 01:36:47 at 23:08:11 23:08:11 +0.0° 210.7° ? 21.8°N 132.1°W AOS 23:09:00 +3.4° 207.9° ? 24.2°N 130.0°W 23:10:00 +8.5° 202.5° ? 27.0°N 127.2°W 23:11:00 +15.8° 192.4° […]

I’ve been reading up a bit on antenna design, particularly the design of Yagi style antennas, and decided to give it a whirl. In particular, I decided to try to design a Yagi that actually is supposed to work on 137.62 megahertz, to see what is possible. I actually am not displeased with the paper […]

It’s just that the weather has been too crappy for me to stand outside with my laptop and do the recordings. But today, the weather dawned nice, and so I did manage to record a nice western pass of NOAA17.

I heard on the amsat-bb mailing list that the repeater aboard the ISS might be active, so tonight I waited for a pass, which occurred at 8:10 or so UTC (just after midnight localtime). The uplink was around 437.800, the downlink on 145.800, which is sort of the reverse of the normal operation on AO-51 […]

Mostly just the regulars, got W0DXC, which is one of those annoying club addresses with no email contact on QRZ. Sigh, oh well. W0DXZ (thanks Ben, for correcting me). Heard from WA8SME Mark, KG7EZ Chris, W6GMT Brock, WA6DIR Larry and probably a couple of others. AO-51, Morning of Jan 31, 2008

Tuning for the Doppler shift on VO-52 is a bit challenging, particularly when you have an antenna in one hand. You all are probably bored with this stuff, but here’s my evening passes recording. It was pretty nice: you can hear WD4FU, the Gainesville, FL station for the University of Florida radio club. It’s the […]

Well, last night I went and programmed in the various doppler shifted frequencies for AO-51 into the new FT-817, and then this morning worked the morning pass half duplex with Leo, W7JPI and W6GMT. The recording of course doesn’t include my own voice, but the audio quality was really good. You can occasionally hear a […]

Well, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I picked up a new Yaesu FT-817ND to expand my capabilities. It’s a neat little radio, and tunes all the way from 160m up to 70cm, and has SSB, AM and CW capabilities. Neat. My idea was to try to listen to AO-16: I figured that the Doppler would […]

The weather here is terrible, and standing outside with an antenna in your hand just isn’t that much fun. But I did manage to handle a few minutes outside. It was rainy, it was cold, but I managed to get WA0D EM12 in Texas before I moved inside (where the noise increased a lot). Not […]

I keep wondering if the whole KISS principle (a personal favorite of mine) might be sensible to apply more thoroughly. Diane, VA3DB pointed me at a satellite design I hadn’t seen before: a picosat that would carry aerogel ultracaps as well as traditional nicads. It was dubbed Volksat. I think there are lots of sensible […]

Well, my plan13 library has been joined with a library that decodes grid squares and the like, and another which downloads orbital elements and stores them in an sqlite3 database. The combination of all these allows you to write simple programs like the one I illustrate below, which gives predictions of the named satellites from […]

Another old time satellite might be waking up from its sleep as it comes out of a period of eclipses. Joanne Maenpaa mentioned that UO-11’s telemetry beacon had been heard on 145.825, so I decided to try to give it a listen on its pass to the east. Despite the fact that it was fairly […]

Couldn’t work the bird at all, it was a low 20 degree pass, and I simply can’t get in when the satellite is crowded like this. Still heard many stations, including N2BX from FN20. I tried to cut in, but I simply got doubled. It would have been a nice DX to West Orange, NJ. […]

Got a QSO with KL7XJ, from BP40 near Anchorage Alaska. Not bad, according to my calculator, that’s about 3250km. Also got regulars VA7VW, and heard KI6FYM calling CQ, but he apparently didn’t hear anyone responding. I’m not sure what his problem was: I don’t think it was just simply being off on Doppler. I think […]