brainwagon

My wife mentioned to me that there was a visual pass of the ISS this evening. Wow, is she awesome or what? She found out about it by subscribing to the twitter feed “twisst”, which is apparently automated, and will send you messages when a ISS pass is about to occur. This pass had a […]

It looks like the launch of the South African amateur satellite is on track! The launch of SumbandilaSat is on track for 15 September 2009. In an interview with SA AMSAT, Johan Erasmus, SunSpace systems engineer speaking from Baikonur, said that the satellite travelled well and that all system performed to specification during the testing […]

I haven’t been playing with the LEO sats much lately, but it’s good to hear that the South African amateur satellite SumbandilaSat is nearing launch. It has a 2m/70cm FM transponder, and a voice beacon. I’ll try to get more information as the launch date gets closer. SumbandilaSat launch scheduled for Sept 15

I tried to record the pass of the ISS as it came over, but I heard nary a peep (or beep) from it as it went over. Annoyed, I did a quick search, and found that the NOAA 17 satellite was just coming up. I retuned and hand tracked that, yielding the following rather nice […]

Planet Earth has entered the age of the Personal Satellite with the introduction of Interorbital’s TubeSat Personal Satellite (PS) Kit. The new IOS TubeSat PS Kit is the low-cost alternative to the CubeSat. It has three-quarters of the mass (0.75-kg) and volume of a CubeSat, but still offers plenty of room for most experiments or […]

The ISS should be operating SSTV on August 3 and 4, using the Robot36 mode. I’ll go ahead and see if I can catch some pictures from space that way. Should work well, after my success with AO-51. SSTV Aug 3 & 4 | ISS Fan Club. Addendum: If you want to test your SSTV […]

Big big thanks to Bill Meara of the Soldersmoke blog for calling my attention to the following link. Even bigger thanks to author Paul Verhage, for putting together this huge collection of useful information about balloon launches. My own high altitude balloon launch ideas have stalled a bit, but this book is excellent inspiration. Near […]

I haven’t been goofing around much with receiving APT weather satellite data, but I was going to try to record some passes now that the days are longer and we get more daylight passes over North America. But I hadn’t programmed the frequencies into my radio, and was forced to look them up. So, here […]

The Official Site for the N-Prize The N-Prize offers two cash Prizes, each of £9,999.99 (nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds and ninety-nine pence, sterling). The prizes will be awarded to the first persons or groups to put into orbit around the Earth a satellite with a mass of between 9.99 and 19.99 grams, […]

Earlier, I blogged about the collision between Iridium 33 and the defunct COSMOS 2251 satellite. Today, I noticed that Celestrak had orbital elements for 134 fragments resulting from the collision. I was curious what the resulting pattern would look like, so I wrote a bit of code to suck them all in and plot them […]

Nice pass today over the middle of the U.S. Got it recorded and transferred, and my wife even took some pictures and a short video of me doing it. I’ll link that in later, but for now, check out the weather! Addendum: Here’s me, recording the very audio that you see turned into a picture […]

Bill Meara over at Soldersmoke pointed me over to the webpage detailing the QRSS transmitter of David, WA5DJJ this morning. Check it out, it’s very inspiring. As it would happen, I’m currently receiving his FSK signal here in CM87ux: Currently my rendering software is saving JPG files at 1 pixel per second. This makes it […]

It was reported that an Iridium satellite and an “non-functional Russian satellite” collided yesterday. I was curious, so I did a bit of digging, and found out that NASA had reported that it was Iridium 33 and COSMOS-2251. A bit more work uncovered orbital elements for both objects, so I was able to plug in […]

Update: If you do a search for NOAA 19 on google, this blog post actually makes it to the front page. Some of you might be looking for information as to how you can listen for it. I use a Radio Shack Pro-60 scanner, tuned to 137.9125 Mhz, set in WFM mode, and my hand […]

Got a quick recording of the PRISM satellite, launched on the 23rd, as it came over my location. It was booming in, very fast Doppler. Here’s a recording and a quick spectrum of it, click on the image to get the spectrum of the 2 minute mp3 recording. MP3 of the Japanese PRISM satellite on […]