Amateur radio, space technology and other geeky stuff by Alexandru Csete
Demonstration of a the persistence function of the FFT plot in GNU Radio. Persistence emulates the look of very old CRT monitors where the cursor leaves a trace of shadow. This is a new eye candy in the GNU Radio and will be available in version 3.3.0
Yesterday was day 2 where we were repairing the broken Azimuth rotator and making a small 90cm dish ready to track UNITEC-1 on 5.84 GHz. Actually, we already fixed the rotator on Monday but we ended up mounting it 180° off and we decided to fix it properly instead of just correcting it in software.
Fixing the orientation of the Azimuth rotoator was very quick – it took only 17 minutes to get up to the mast, lift the antenna construction, change the orientation of the rotator and fasten the nuts and bolts again. We had the practice from yesterday.
Next item on the agenda was to make a small helix with two turns to feed the 90cm dish so that we can use this smaller dish for tracking UNITEC-1 in the beginning of the interplanetary cruise. We found some online helical antenna calculator to generate the design but that was more than 1 GHz off and it took a lot of tweaking and tuning to get it close to 5.8 GHz. Here are the results, photos and videos.
As you probably already know the UNITEC-1 launch got scrubbed today (17th May). Fortunately, there is a launch window every day for the next few weeks.
During the last few days I learned that tracking UNITEC-1 will be very difficult because the available trajectory data can be very uncertain. Therefore, we decided to use a smaller antenna with wider beam width in the first few days after launch. One option was to mount the IKEA dish to piggyback the 7m dish, another option was to use a 90cm dish which is currently equipped with a 2.4 GHz feed. We decided to go for the second option.
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
Below you will find the link budget summary calculated for a few distances during the interplanetary cruise of UNITEC-1. The link budget calculator sheet containing all the details is available here. Parameter Value Frequency 5840 MHz TX Power 4.8 W / 6.8 dBW / 36.8 dBm TX Ant Gain 5 dBi EIRP 11.8 dBW Distance … Read more
With only a few days left until the launch of UNITEC-1 (May 17) to Venus, we are getting ready to track it and I am trying to catch up on the documentation part – this time a brief description of the receiver hardware.
Recall the system architecture where the 5.84 GHz RF signal is converted to 640 MHz using the KU LNC 5659 C PRO low noise down converter, and…
This article gives a high level walkthrough of the receiver used to convert the 640 MHz IF to digital baseband, i.e. the blue box called USRP in the above diagram.
On this page you will find a few software defined radio (SDR) examples implemented in the GNU Radio Companion aka GRC. They are very simple yet functional examples I created while I was learning GNU Radio and SDR. I hope other who are learning GNU Radio and SDR might also find them useful.
I was fooling around with the USRP / WBX on the 2 meter band tonight when I suddenly stumbled upon some very strong SSTV transmission. It turned out to be the OZ9STV robot located only a few kilometers from me. That explained why I had more than 40 dB SNR even though I was only using a bad whip antenna indoors.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010 we finally got a chance to test the 5.8 GHz receiver for the UNITEC-1 ground station on the air. The weather was nice and the weak wind allowed us to be on the roof and listen for the OZ7IGY beacon 40 km away.
New update of the simple receiver – version 0.6 – with the following changes: