brainwagon

While I am on the antenna kick, Howard, G6LVB mentioned his page on putting two cheap yagis on the same boom. Very, very nice. 10db of gain for a reasonably small antenna, and RHCP to boot. Homebrew Satellite Antenna.

This morning, I decided to take the new box that I had acquired and remount my K1EL keyer into it. The new box is somewhat larger, so it actually has space for all five of the possible dedicated buttons that the K1EL supports, instead of the mere three that I had haphazardly bored into the […]

I woke up this morning, and wanted to relax a bit before the day’s exciting activities (more on this later), so I noted that NOAA17 was coming up. I got out after the pass (which had a maximum elevation of under 15 degrees) was under way, but the audio sounded pretty clear, so I recorded […]

I just head that Endeavor will eject a small picosatellite (5x5x10 inches) that will test two different types of solar cells in the environment of space before it begins its deorbit maneuvers. I was interested in seeing if I could find any downlink frequencies for it, but haven’t managed to do so. I did find […]

In my house, we celebrated the holiday yesterday, to give my son a chance to go and have Thanksgiving dinner with his in-laws. So I made a turkey, a ham, two pumpkin cheesecakes, potatoes, stuffing, a ratatouille, some gravy and a bunch of veggie appetizers. My future daughter-in-law made some green bean casserole. My wife […]

Today’s example comes from the amsat-bb mailing list. I am a member of AMSAT and a subscriber to the amsat-bb mailing list because it’s an interesting subject that I desire to learn more about and that I enjoy sharing with my fellow hams. But AMSAT is seemingly in a struggle to save itself from extinction, […]

It’s not too exciting, but it’s a start. During a 30 degree pass, I managed to get MacRobot SSTV to decode this partial image. It’s not the greatest SSTV decoder: it seems to miss the VIS preamble almost all the time, and loses sync fairly often when noise interrupts, which when you think of it, […]

YouTube – Cute-1.7 + APD II Earth Movie From the amsat-bb: We release the movie taken by Cute-1.7 +APD II. It was taken above Japan. The movie is very short. But, it is the 1st movie taken by 3 kg satellite in the world. From this movie, we could confirm that the satellite rotates at […]

Sven Grahn’s Space Tracking Notes talks about his efforts in using radio to track satellites. There is all sorts of really good stuff in here, a lot of it having to do with tracking the secret launches of Russian satellites during the Cold War. Very, very neat stuff.

Just a link to the papers from the CubeSat Developer’s Workshop 2008. I’ve gotten more interested in satellite design and what’s possible over the last few months, particularly in power management. CubeSat Community Website – Developers Workshop 2008

I’ve been trying to catch the SEEDS cubesat in SSTV/digitalker mode for a while. No dice. But I did record three of the cubesats as they marched across. Below is a 15 minute mp3 file. First up is COMPASS-1, which has a very squirrelly sounding morse signal. Next up is CUTE-1.7 APD II (honestly folks, […]

Click below for a color picture relayed back to earth from the CUTE-1.7 satellite. It is my understanding that CUTE is only capable of sending this kind of data back under command from its ground station in Japan, so I won’t be receiving these myself, but I’m fairly impressed. The camera on board is essentially […]

All the fun I’ve been having with tracking satellites has made me want to create a nice little database of all the frequencies they use. This page seems like it had everything you need: All satellites list update

Last night I was redoing my Python script that did Doppler tracking. There was a very low (max elevation under fifteen degrees) pass of SEEDS II that came up while I was making changes, so I went ahead and used it to record some of its Morse telemetry. The signal was pretty weak and intermittent, […]

In an earlier posting, I presented a recording that I did of the new Russian satellite Yubileiny, also designated RS-30. I finally found my spectrogram code, and made a picture of the resulting recording. It’s kind of big, but click the thumbnail below if you want to have a peek: The image consists of 27 […]