brainwagon

I heard that the telemetry signal from LO-19 was quite strong, and could be easily picked up with even the simplest equipment. It’s sent as 12wpm morse on 437.125 Mhz or so. I don’t really have any equipment that does Morse reception on that frequency, but I figured that I might hear it anyway. The […]

Alligators have big mouths, but little ears. On a satellite, an alligator is someone who sends a loud signal without listening, effectively trashing someone elses communication. On this SO-50 pass, I was having some difficulty getting in because people are obviously hitting transmit without listening for each other. I tried to get the downlink a […]

Yesterday I posted an image that I had captured from the NOAA-17 weather satellite on a pass over the bay area in the mid morning. Today, I did the same thing. Whereas yesterday the weather was reasonably clear, today, it was a bit cloudier and colder, and you can see the difference a day makes […]

If you’ve listened to some of my satellite audio, you’ll notice that in addition to the callsigns, people are exchanging things that sound like “Delta Mike 41” or “Charlie Mike 87”. These are Maidenhead gridsquares: a system of rapidly transmitting your rough location. The kind most commonly heard are the ones that are 4 characters […]

Yep, another AO-51 pass this morning. I frankly was in a rush, and for the life of me can’t remember who it was I worked (although I got my first contact in Nebraska), but luckily, I recorded the QSO as always. When I get a coffee break, I’ll work my way through it. Until then, […]

Yep, it’s back. Worked N6PAA and WA6FWF (although I totally misheard his call originally, glad I record these things). I was fighting antenna polarization early in the pass, the signals got very strong around max elevation. Signals were as quiet as I can ever remember hearing them. AO-51 Pass to the west, Jan 15, 2008

I mentioned Delfi-C3 a few weeks ago. It’s another amateur satellite that is tentatively scheduled to launch on March 7. The rocket will actually carry six individual amateur radio payloads. You can read about them all on the AMSAT UK website: AMSAT-UK – Six Amateur Radio satellites to launch in March

Well, I’ve made some headway on a project that I thought would be cool to write: porting G3RUH’s Plan 13 Satellite Prediction algorithm to a more palateable language than BASIC. I chose python, and it appears to be mostly working. It reads in the TLE orbital elements (same ones I use in “predict” or “gpredict”) […]

Sigh. I was gonna work AO-51 this morning, but couldn’t hear the downlink. I shifted to the digital downlink frequency, and could hear it was active. It appears the satellite is temporarily off line. From the amsat-bb mailing list: AO-51 stopped transmitting and went into Boot Loader mode. The command team has reset the satellite […]

Click here to check outThe Bay Area Modern Geek Ham Radio Meetup! Alex Perez, KD7OFR, sent a message to the AMSAT mailing list, basically asking “where are all the hams, and why aren’t we doing more to attract new, particularly younger hams into amateur radio?” Great questions. I wish I had a great answer. The […]

Well, it was a scheduled 88 degree high pass for me today on AO-51, so I was out there with my Arrow again. For the second time in a week, I’ve ended up calling CQ on the satellite because nobody was talking. That finally scared of regular WA8SME (thanks Mark) and I got Gerry, KB7F […]

I’ve been pondering the amateur mode known as FeldHell or Hellschrieber. It’s a very old mode, dating back to a patent in 1929. I’ll let Randy, K7AGE explain it with a demo on youtube: For fun, I sat down and wrote and encoder for it. It tries to be really good about bandwidth, I haven’t […]

Early today, I had problem with feedback on my little Sony ICD-P520 voice recorder during an AO-51 pass, which was unusual: I’d never heard it before. I suspected that it might be because I didn’t have a connector tightended or an audio jack stuck in all the way, and wanted to work the evening pass […]

I’ve been pondering potential upgrades to my satellite capabilities. Right now, I’m using a very popular combination: an arrow antenna and a Kenwood TH-D7A. Often, at the beginning of passes, where satellites are still relatively distant, I get very weak signals, and can’t often hear the satellite well until they are maybe 15 or 20 […]

First time I worked AO-27 in the new year, caught regulars WA8SME, VA7MG, WA6KYR (who I didn’t recognize, but I worked him on December 19th), KI6IUJ, and WX7P. MP3 Recording of QSOs for Jan 5, 2008 on AO-27, around 22:45 UTC The audio starts pretty raspy, you can barely hear me coming back through the […]