brainwagon

Before computers, my first love-affair with geekiness was an interest in telescopes and astronomy. For the past few years, I’ve slacked off considerably in my telescope making activities, but every once in a while I see something that piques my interest. Gary Honis has a fascinating webpage that details several conversions of digital SLR cameras […]

A few years ago when the amateur satellite AO-51 transmitted a beacon message on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, it was enough to rekindle my interest in amateur radio (which had lain dormant for nearly a decade) and got me working amateur satellites. On April 16, 17 and 18, there is an Echoes of Apollo/Moonbounce […]

A recent issue of Make magazine had an article about launching water rockets via hydrogen/oxygen combustion: basically an electric current is used to break water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, which then bubbles up in the rocket, forcing out some additional water. To launch, this hydrogen is ignited, and recombines quickly into water vapor, […]

There has been a lot of publications lately about water rockets. These are rockets which are usually constructed of empty plastic soda bottles, pressurized by a bicycle pump and launched into the air. I haven’t done any of this, but it sounds like great fun. I even picked up a copy of Soda Pop Rockets […]

KJ6AKQ tackles a project I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: the construction of a little handheld satellite antenna: Building an IOio satellite antenna – KJ6AKQ.

Poking around on archive.org, I found that Louis Bell’s classic work The Telescope was available for download. It is a pretty nice book, well worth reading if one has an interest in astronomy and telescopes. It is part history, part engineering, and part user’s guide. It also includes some great illustrations such as the one […]

I don’t really have the hardware to effectively transmit to satellites in linear transponder mode. To really make it straightforward, you probably would like to have a computer to handle the Doppler tracking and antenna pointing, and a full duplex SSB transmitter (or a pair of ordinary ones). That’s more than I am willing to […]

I have a bizarre fascination with algae. There is a lot of science going on with algae for use in food stuffs, in detoxifying industrial waste, and even as food. But my geek-itude is vastly exceeded by Jared Bouck, whose created an entire site about the cultivation of algae. I’m bookmarking this for later fun. […]

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 […]

Courtesy of hack-a-day, check out the following video illustrating an analog computer that implements the dynamics of a bouncing ball, not using a microprocessor, but just a circuit involving analog operational amplifiers. Bouncing ball analog computer – Hack a Day. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt6RVrmvh-o

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.

I’ve been reading up a bit on antenna design, particularly the design of Yagi style antennas, and decided to give it a whirl. In particular, I decided to try to design a Yagi that actually is supposed to work on 137.62 megahertz, to see what is possible. I actually am not displeased with the paper […]

It’s just that the weather has been too crappy for me to stand outside with my laptop and do the recordings. But today, the weather dawned nice, and so I did manage to record a nice western pass of NOAA17.

I keep wondering if the whole KISS principle (a personal favorite of mine) might be sensible to apply more thoroughly. Diane, VA3DB pointed me at a satellite design I hadn’t seen before: a picosat that would carry aerogel ultracaps as well as traditional nicads. It was dubbed Volksat. I think there are lots of sensible […]

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”) […]