brainwagon

Okay, I got about half of the Plan 13 code ported to C++. It’s a fresh port of the original BASIC code, but modularized into objects better, and with a few bits of tidiness that C++ provides over basic. I estimate another hour or so to finish the code, if I work carefully and efficiently. […]

Well, tonight I had some mild success! My Gameduino satellite tracker is up and running! It’s not got much in the way of a user interface, but it here you see the ISS position marked with a purple/magenta dot, and then dots showing the position of the ISS every three minutes for the next two […]

This article was linked from hackaday, and seems very, very cool. Sure, GPS receivers are cheap, but building one is cool. I am not likely to be doing a project like this, but it’s cool to read about. Homemade GPS Receiver.

My recent playing with SSTV images coming from ARRISSat-1 have made me think a bit more about SSTV. I used two different applications to decode SSTV images (MMSSTV on Windows, and Multiscan on OS X), and got slightly different results in terms of performance from each. This leads me to ask “just what are the […]

Some of you may remember that I wrote my own APT satellite decoder. I ran across someone else who did the same: ATPDEC by Thierry Leconte (F4DWV) It has the same basic philosophy as my own crude efforts: hand it a WAV file, and it will find and produce the APT imagery from inside it. […]

I overslept this morning, and woke up a scant 10 minutes before this morning’s good pass of ARISSat-1 was to begin. Still, all I had to do was go out to my car, grab my Arrow, and my HP laptop, and my trusty VX-3R, and I should be able to make it. I started pulling […]

I’ve been trying to get out and record more ARISSAT-1 passes, in the hopes of getting some nice SSTV images. If you follow @brainwagon on twitter, you are likely to see some of the more mundane images that I’ve been getting thusfar. I keep hoping to snag some truly great ones, but thus far, the […]

Got a short recording of ARISSat-1 this evening. Not 100% sure, but it may have transitioned into low power mode at the end of this recording, I seemed to lose carrier and couldn’t reacquire the satellite. In any case, here’s the recording, and the one decoded SSTV image (not too exciting, but pretty clear). ARISSat-1 […]

I got a tweet from twisst, the ISS pass prediction robot yesterday indicating that I’d have a good pass around 8:25PM. While I am fighting off a cold, the weather was beautiful and nice, and so I ran some path predictions to see what the path looked like, and also checked on ARISSat-1’s path to […]

I didn’t get a chance to record any more ARISSAT-1 data this weekend, but I did catch up on some reading. Apparently, it’s batteries are giving out quicker than expected: the voltage is dropping low enough to cause a reset when the satellite goes into eclipse each orbit. If you were thinking of grabbing some […]

I haven’t had the chance to do any ARISSAT-1 SSTV lately, but I thought I’d snoop over to their gallery to have a peek. Some good pictures are being received, but it appears that some earlier pictures are simply being removed: two pictures that I submitted to them earlier are no longer available. Their comment: […]

Success! I managed to record the pass of ARISSAT-1 from my front yard this morning. I woke up around 7:00AM, and tried quickly to get ready. I pulled on some clothes, then I dug out my handy Arrow antenna (a hand held dual band Yagi antenna for 2m and 70cm) and my tiny Yaesu VX-3 […]

Drew, KO4MA, didn’t let a little thing like the missing antenna on ARISSAT-1 keep him down. He aimed his antennas at the satellite, and recorded the following: What’s goin on here? Drew has a pretty good antenna setup, which includes an M2 CP42 for the uplink. That provides about 16.8db of gain. Since the ARISSAT-1 […]

Okay folks, I’m sorry, I promised that I’d try to stay up late enough to record some of the first passes of ARISSAT-1, but physical need for sleep outpaced my natural enthusiasm and curiosity, and the first good pass found me sound asleep. Through some perverse quirk of fate, all the best passes of the […]

First, the good news: ARISSAT-1 is floating free in space. I urge hams to listen for its 2m downlink on 145.950 to see if you can hear it. There is also a CW beacon on 145.919 and a special BPSK-1000 telemetry downlink on 145.920. Now, the bad news. It appears that the UHF antenna was […]