Amateur radio, space technology and other geeky stuff by Alexandru Csete
When I bought my FT-817 (second hand) it came with a shoulder strap but the shoulder strap holders were missing. I talked to the seller and he promised to send them to me. Few days later I have received another shoulder strap so that now I had two shoulder straps but still no holder! Now … Read more
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.
Celestia 1.6.0 is now available for download. Last night I decided to test drive it by executing the demo script and recording it on my Mac.
I was playing around with WebSDR the other night. It was really fun – next I’ll try to record myself on 80 or 40 meters 🙂 Watch in HD resolution.
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
Here is my latest attempt in my Moon with a Webcam series, though this time I used a very cheap camcorder instead of a webcam. Still plenty of room for improvement. Full resolution video. I used a Meade ETX-90 telescope f=1250mm with 26mm eyepiece → 48X magnification. This time I was holding the camera by hand but … 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
What a beautiful photo! Ariane 5 V188 with Herschel and Planck on board rises above ESA’s 15m ESTRACK tracking station at Kourou, French Guiana, just after liftoff at 15:12 CEST, 14 May 2009. Click for full size image
Today I have upgraded my Joomla installation from version 1.5.6 to 1.5.10. Everything went all right but if you notice some problems just let me know. At the same time I have replaced the commenting system with Disqus using a plug-in from JoomlaWorks. The old commenting system has been disabled and the old comments are … Read more