brainwagon

I’ve been pondering potential upgrades to my satellite capabilities. Right now, I’m using a very popular combination: an arrow antenna and a Kenwood TH-D7A. Often, at the beginning of passes, where satellites are still relatively distant, I get very weak signals, and can’t often hear the satellite well until they are maybe 15 or 20 […]

Well, during a road trip with my wife to San Diego and back, I managed to begin to type up my notes for an upcoming tutorial article (cross fingers) on reception and decoding of weather satellite imagery. I basically reimplemented what I had, stripping it down to its barest essence, and trying to make it […]

Okay, I was bored waiting for potential Ande passes, so I tuned into Genesat. I got a few telemetry packets, although the frequency seemed to be 5khz low from the published frequency of 437.075Mhz. KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.orgB4511B0A00000000000000260069009F7113722166CC790B02F0 KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.orgFA511B06000000000001002600690001EA02BA27081CBF026621 KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.org04521B8A010E018901DD010100A4015F2DCB1C226D951D1C023A KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.org36521B73010F017101DE010000A4019F992216023D996D22E207 KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.org3B521B72010F016E01DE010000A4015F2DCB1C226D951D1C023A KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.org40521B0100000001000100250069005F2299221C02202274231C KE7EGC>UNDEF,TELEM:GeneSat1.org45521B0200000002000000260069009F07BC13A0230013281C02 Not sure what any of it means, but there it goes.

More interesting reading, from Tom Clark on the AMSAT mailing list.

Yawn. Recorded another satellite pass. Decoded it with my software. Played with it in GIMP. Part of the pass spoiled by an oddly synchronous signal, which seemed to also be Doppler shifted. Problem on the satellite? I don’t know. NOAA17 Pass, Dec 14, 2007

Well, I was awake for a decent daytime pass of NOAA17, so I wandered out into my front yard, and recorded the pass. It was a westward pass, covering from Canada all the way down to Baja California in the south, and was reasonably noise free over a great amount of it. I hauled it […]

Well, I’ve been experimenting a bit more with some weather satellite reception, and on the off chance that anyone cares, I thought I’d write down some of what I learned. Last night (after dark) I decided to record an NOAA-17 pass. This time, I used my Yaesu VX-3R, which has a wideband FM setting, and […]

Okay, this isn’t that impressive, but let me explain. Larger version of the same… I recorded about 4.5 minutes of audio from one of the weather satellites, using my small pocket recorder and a Kenwood TH-D7A. In most respects, I shouldn’t expect anything good to happen. I’m using a cheap little voice recorder. I’m using […]

Apparently the peakcock mantis shrimp packs a mighty wallop, which can even shatter the glass of aquariums. They also are responsible for the introduction of a new word to my vocabulary: “shrimpoluminescence”. Catch the linked video below. USATODAY.com – Shrimp spring into shattering action The speed of the strike (up to 50 mph, or 23 […]

I was a little bit disappointed when I found out the total was a bit short of what the header proclaimed, but you should still check out 1001 things to do with liquid nitrogen LN2 also works great for sweeping and cleaning hard floors such as concrete or wood. Get a couple liters in a […]

Gravity is a very, very weak force.  Back in 1798, Cavendish used a torsion balance to try to estimate the value of G, the gravitational constant.   What’s cool is that you can reproduce this experiment yourself.   Check out Bending Spacetime in the Basement, which includes some nifty videos of the torsion balance in action. [tags]Science,Gravitation,Science […]

Courtesy of the Make blog, here are some instructions on building a very simple refracting telescope. I’ve done something like this before by scavenging lenses from broken binoculars I find a flea markets and mounting them into lengths of PVC pipe. Of course real telescope makers grind their own mirrors. 🙂

Today’s bizarre science link of the day comes from the opticsforkids.com website, and is entitled Optics Fun With Gelatin. Edible optics? What optical phenomena have you noticed in a bowl of Jell-O? Find a small laser, buy a box of unflavored gelatin, and have some fun in your kitchen. I couldn’t agree more.

Hamster-Powered Night Light is a really nice school project that the people at otherpower.com helped an eight grader realize. They modified a hamster wheel to be a custom generator, and also rigged an ordinary bicycle computer to give them “telemetry”. Neat stuff, and definitely helps student learn about motors, generators, and magnetism.

Slashdot is running an article about a Cornell group who built an unmanned model aircraft using rather conventional hardware and Microsoft Windows XP embedded. What intrigued me most about the story was that the group tested their algorithms for flight control by using them to control a simulated aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator. A brief […]