OZ9AEC

FM traffic and packet radio from the AO-27 amateur radio satellite. I made this recording last Saturday while testing the Gqrx software receiver using the cross yagis at OZ7SAT and the Funcube Dongle.

Gqrx is a software defined radio receiver for Funcube Dongle (FCD), RTL2832U-based DVB-T devices (RTL-SDR), Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRP) and Osmo SDR devices. It is powered by GNU Radio and the Qt GUI toolkit.

Yesterday I successfully received APRS transmissions from the International Space Station on 145.825 MHz using my Yaesu FT-817 connected to my MacBook Pro via a Signalink audio interface and a USB sound adapter.

Last week I started on a new experiment trying to integrate the AFSK1200 demodulator code from multimon into a simple Qt-based graphical application. This experiment had two objectives:

1. Test the feasibility of integrating the AFSK1200 demodulator from multimon into other applications.
2. Try using the QAudio framework from Qt for audio I/O that should work on both Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

With both the frequency controller and FFT plot widgets in place gqrx was ready for the first on the air tests. The video below shows the first reception of the AO-27 amateur radio satellite during orbit 92436 and 92437, using the Funcube Dongle receiver that I use for portable space communication.