Amateur radio, space technology and other geeky stuff by Alexandru Csete
AMSAT OZ staff are preparing the 7 meter dish for tracking the UNITEC-1 interplanetary spacecraft. Related articles: UNITEC-1 Link Budget C-band Receiver Hardware for UNITEC-1 UNITEC-1 5.8 GHz Receiver Test Using OZ7IGY Smaller dish for tracking UNITEC-1 5.8 GHz Helical Feed for the 90cm dish UNITEC-1 Tracking Report
One of the reasons I have been very excited to get the WBX transceiver daughterboard for the USRP is that with one single RF board I can have a full duplex transceiver covering both the 2 m and 70 cm amateur radio bands. This is where most of the amateur radio satellite traffic takes place, … Read more
This video shows my first on-the-air tests with the WBX transceiver using the USRP (Universal Software Radio Peripheral) and GNU Radio.
The receiver was tested using wide band FM broadcast, APT signal from NOAA 17 satellite and Copenhagen VOLMET. I have also performed some tests using DVB-T signal and wireless sensor signals but I wanted to keep the video short so these were not included. I can post them in separate videos if there is interest.
It was a good day today. At long last, I have received my WBX transceiver boards for the USRP! I have been waiting for this transceiver board for quite some time now because I didn’t really have and transmit capabilities in the VHF and UHF bands. This board was expected to cover 50 MHz to … Read more
Now that I have Ubuntu 9.04 runnign on my Asus Eee PC 701 it was very easy to get Gpredict up and running. After a few configuration tweaks related to the views it runs and looks very well even on this small 800×480 pixel display! Watch in high resolution. Thus, I have now following hamradio … Read more
Today, there were two good passes of SO-67 over Europe with the amateur radio transponder activated. Watch in high resolution. Watch in high resolution.
I heard about the Arrow II Satellite antenna quite some time ago and even seen a lots of videos about it on YouTube. Unfortunately, whenever I look for an opportunity to get one, I couldn’t find it anywhere in Europe. Until recently, when I learned by a coincidence that Antenna Warehouse is also shipping them … Read more
July 30, 2009 at 1722 UTC, space shuttle Endeavor (STS-127) deployed the Atmospheric Neutral Density Experiment (ANDE) consisting of two satellites, Pollux and Castor. The Deployment happens just after 5:00. You can read more about the ANDE mission here.
On July 20, AMSAT will mark the 40th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing with a special event on the AO-51 amateur radio satellite. During evening passes in the U.S. and Europe, AO-51 will transmit a message commemorating the event. The message will be transmitted on the 435.300 MHz FM downlink and will contain … Read more
Ten days after the release of Gpredict 1.0 beta 4 we are now ready with a new release that fixes some minor bugs in the radio controller. The significant changes in this release: Fixed some bugs that caused the Doppler shift to be calculated incorrectly in some cases. Fixed a bug that could cause the … Read more