Amateur radio, space, technology and other geeky stuff by Alexandru Csete
In commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of ARISS, the International Space Station is transmitting Slow Scan Television on 145.800. The SSTV event started on the 20th July and will continue until the 24th.
Continue reading “SSTV event from the International Space Station”
Two months ago I hooked up my VHF satellite receiver to the SatNOGS network. Since then, the receiver has been receiving many different satellites, including APT images from NOAA 15, 18 and 19.
Back in December 2016, Shaun Whitehead of ThumbNet sent me of their new rtlsdr-based N3 Nongles but I was too busy to do anything serious with SDR. Now that I got a 137 MHz turnstile antenna up for testing I had an obvious opportunity to try it with the weather satellites.
Continue reading “NOAA-19, Meteor-M N2 and the Thumbnet N3 SDR Nongle”
Tonight I tested the turnstile antenna and Airspy on the Meteor-M N2 LRPT downlink signal. It was a good, high elevation pass and it looks like the signal is strong enough to decode the transmitted images.
Some time ago I got a 137 MHz turnstile antenna from Jørn OZ6TA. We decided to build an automated NOAA weather satellite image receiver using a modern SDR device. He also had an Airspy he wasn’t using and so it became the SDR radio we were going to use for this.
Continue reading “My first weather satellite images with a 137 MHz turnstile antenna”
Some of you may have noticed that my website has undergone significant changes. This was a consequence of my old website being compromised and and infected by malware.
Now that I finished my Omnia SDR for the 60, 40, 30 and 20 meter bands, I started looking into how I could use it on Linux. I remembered reading some emails on the project mailing list about using Quisk, which is a mature SDR transceiver application written by James Ahlstrom, N2ADR. I decided to give it a try.
Tonight I completed the TX part of my Omnia SDR for the 60/40/30/20 meter bands 😀
I have collected a bunch of old Raspberry Pi model B’s equipped with the Wolfson audio board. You may find these board lying around and collecting dust, as they have been obsoleted by an increasing number of multi-core boards. I will use these boards as simple Softrock SDR receivers, but first I want to do a little experiment. I am going try using them as a headless FreeDV modem similar to the SM1000.
Continue reading “Can we use a Raspberry Pi model B as FreeDV modem?”
Following the successful receiver tests yesterday, I continued today with the band pass filters completing the receiver chain. I decided to build for 60/40/30/20 meters, which can provide a good all round, day and night transceiver.