Archive for category: Amateur Satellite

Weekend Update…

February 5, 2018 | 3D printing, Amateur Radio, Amateur Satellite, ESP32, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

This is just a short set of updates for my weekend projects, meant to keep me in the habit. I’ll write up a more complete version of these projects going forward. First of all, a new acquisition. My Anet A8 3D printer has proven to be, well, not the most reliable of gadgets. I still […]

More progress on the ISS clock project…

January 31, 2018 | Amateur Radio, Amateur Satellite, ESP32, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

I haven’t posted an update here recently, but I am (mostly) living up to my New Year’s resolution to spend at least 30 minutes a day working on a project. This has taken the form of some stupid but necessary chores (like fixing the broken pull cord on my lawnmower) but has mostly taken the […]

Brief Update on my ESP32 ISS Clock

January 23, 2018 | Amateur Satellite, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

Several days ago, I cobbled together a short bit of code to make an NTP enabled clock out of an ESP32/OLED module. I had previously used an ESP8266 and a separate module to make a little demo that predicted the location of the ISS. I thought that the ESP32 would make a better development platform, […]

pinMode v. digitalWrite: what’s with this use (abuse?) of internal pullups?

March 4, 2017 | Amateur Satellite, ESP8266, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

This post is the kind of round about post you get first thing in the morning.   I’ll get to the title question at the end. This morning, I was interested in doing a tiny bit of tinkering. I had found one of these 4 digit 7 segment LED displays while digging around for something […]

How making an ISS clock turns into researching an optimization problem involving spherical Voronoi diagrams…

February 20, 2017 | Amateur Satellite, ESP8266 | By: Mark VandeWettering

A few years ago, I got seriously interested in amateur radio and satellites. I would often haul out a small Yagi antenna and my trusty Kenwood TH-D7A and try to talk to other hams by bouncing signals off the various satellites which acted as amateur radio repeaters. During that time, I wrote a Python version […]

Exciting AMSAT-NA opportunity…

April 25, 2015 | Amateur Radio, Amateur Satellite | By: Mark VandeWettering

I read this today: AMSAT is excited to announce that we have accepted an opportunity to participate in a potential rideshare as a hosted payload on a geostationary satellite planned for launch in 2017. An amateur radio payload, operating in the Amateur Satellite Service, will fly on a spacecraft which Millennium Space Systems (MSS) of […]

SSTV from the ISS…

April 11, 2015 | Amateur Radio, Amateur Satellite, Space, SSTV | By: Mark VandeWettering

Well, it’s not pretty, but I was just using a 17″ whip antenna on my VX-8GR, recorded it with Audacity, and then decoded it with MultiScan on my Macbook. The first bit of the recording is pretty rocky, so I had to start the sync myself. I’ve bean meaning to do some experiments with bad […]

Slow Scan Television from the ISS this weekend…

April 10, 2015 | Amateur Radio, Amateur Satellite, SSTV | By: Mark VandeWettering

Note: This post was adapted by an email that I sent out to our ham radio club. If anyone is interested in a fun little ham radio related activitytonight, you can try to receive slow scan television from the International Space Station this weekend. I haven’t done this in a while,but I think I’ll give […]

Increasing pyephem’s accuracy for satellite rise/set calculations…

March 8, 2015 | Amateur Satellite, Amateur Science, Python | By: Mark VandeWettering

A few years ago, I created my own Python implementation of the Plan13 satellite prediction code written by James Miller (G3RUH). The Plan13 algorithm isn’t very complicated: you can easily run it on processors like the Arduino (in fact, I used it for my ANGST satellite tracker) But somehow, I managed to misplace the source […]

Digital ATV resources…

April 1, 2014 | Amateur Radio, Amateur Satellite | By: Mark VandeWettering

I’ve been doing a bunch of reading about digital ATV operations lately. I was originally motivated by hearing about the HamTV project aboard the ISS. Back in 2007, I got re-energized into ham radio by learning that for the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, the amateur satellite AO-51 would broadcast a cool message that I heard […]

Building a distributed satellite ground station network (or not…)

January 3, 2012 | Amateur Radio, Amateur Satellite, Hacking, Rants and Raves | By: Mark VandeWettering

My twitter intro says that I am an “enthusiast for enthusiasm”. When I wrote that, it was simply because there are some questions that I really think aren’t helpful at all. Questions like: Why didn’t you just buy X instead of building your own? Didn’t somebody do that years ago? Why are you playing with […]

ANGST: the Arduino n’ Gameduino Satellite Tracker

November 13, 2011 | Amateur Radio, Amateur Satellite, electronics, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

I’ve stopped hacking on my Arduino/Gameduino satellite tracker for now. Here’s the final video demonstrating it running: I’m currently working on the final schematic which will be posted on this permanent page. The code will be available github.com, for right now, it includes the library that I wrote that does the satellite prediction. I’ll be […]

What’s Up: A Visual Database of Satellites and Debris

October 20, 2011 | Amateur Satellite | By: Mark VandeWettering

I’ve pondered creating something like this a bunch of times: a way to visualize all the satellites currently in Earth orbit. Somebody beat me to it, using Google Earth and a .kml file. It’s pretty astounding just how packed low earth orbit is, and it’s cool to check out the band of geostationary satellites as […]

Still more on my Arduino/Gameduino Satellite Tracker…

October 8, 2011 | Amateur Satellite, Arduino, Gameduino | By: Mark VandeWettering

I need to think up a better name for this project. Calling it the “Arduino/Gameduino Satellite Tracker” is just too damned cumbersome for words. Progress was slow today. I woke up around 4:00AM with a sore throat and a miserable cough. A quick trip to the urgent care clinic when it opened reassured me that […]

Scrappy introduces my Arduino/Gameduino Satellite Tracker

October 7, 2011 | Amateur Radio, Amateur Satellite, Arduino, Gameduino, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering

My cat Scrappy decided it was time to film a brief progress video of my Arduino/Gameduino satellite tracker. I completed the basic port and testing of my Plan13 implementation to C++ for the Arduino, and got it running pretty well. It doesn’t seem to be much more compact than Bruce Robertson’s qrpTracker code, but it […]