FM transmissions over FO-29 linear transponder

I have previously written about interference from FM stations on the HO-68 linear transponder. Now it appears the other satellites with linear transponders also suffer from local FM traffic by people who haven’t got a clue that they are transmitting in the satellite uplink segment of the 2 meter band.

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ITUpSAT1 cubesat reception with Funcube Dongle and Arrow antenna

This is the third satellite reception of a series recorded on Monday, February 28, 2011 using the Funcube Dongle software defined radio receiver and the Arrow II hand-held satellite antenna. The satellite is the ITUpSAT-1 cubesat transmitting with 100 mW FM CW and the recording was done in JO45KG during orbit 7593.

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ARISSat-1: Why is it cool and why do we care?

ARISSat-1 photo 2It looks like AMSAT is going to launch a new satellite! ARISSat-1 – the successor of SuitSat-1 – is ready to be launched on Progress-41P heading to the International Space Station on Friday, January 28, 2011. It will be deployed into its own orbit during EVA 27 currently scheduled for February 16. Once in orbit, it will slowly decay and eventually burn up in the Earth’ atmosphere. SuitSat-1 decayed after 7 months in orbit and that’s also a likely life time for ARISSat-1.

So, why is ARISSat-1 cool and why should we care?

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Interference on HO-68 linear transponder

Wednesday, November 10, Pete MI3EPN reported that he heard what sounded like FM transmissions on the lower end of the HO-68 / XW-1 linear transponder and it didn’t sound like ham radio operators making contact over a satellite. It was an interesting coincidence because I could remember that I have seen some FM-like signals while I was recording HO-68 on Tuesday evening but I thought it was some local interference.

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From double side band to single side band reception

Simple CW receiver 0.3When I presented the Simple CW Receiver few weeks ago I also mentioned and demonstrated that it is actually a double side band receiver (it’s around 2:35 in the video). This is good for AM and FM, but can be very inconvenient for receiving CW and SSB (single side band). If the station we are trying to receive is surrounded by other stations on the neighbouring channels, these will interfere via the opposite side band. Therefore, it was time to look into single side band reception.

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WBX Transceiver Tests using GNU Radio and USRP

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.

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