Amateur radio, space, technology and other geeky stuff by Alexandru Csete
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.
Continue reading “FM transmissions over FO-29 linear transponder”
Here is a new recording showing an updated Gqrx receiving the FO-29 amateur radio satellite using the Funcube Dongle. Previous recordings used an early version of Gqrx. It was a very quiet pass, most notable thing was probably the Russian and Spanish hams using FM. They probably don’t have a clue that their signal comes over a satellite transponder. Another video recording focusing on the FM transmissions during this FO-29 pass is available here.
Continue reading “FO-29 reception with Gqrx and Funcube Dongle (new recording)”
Thanks to Jan Simon, DL2ZXA, we now have daily builds of Gpredict for Ubuntu 10.04 – 12.04, both 32 and 64 bit. Jan’s recipe fetches the code imported from SourceForge, merges it with the translations done in the Launchpad, then builds the packages and puts them in the Gpredict teams Daily builds PPA. You can use this PPA as you would use any other PPA; if you don’t know how check out the instructions on the PPA page. Obviously, this is only recommended for testing and not for production use.
One of the great advantages of software defined radio receivers is that tuning receiver settings is a matter of adjusting software parameters. Gqrx is no different here and has optimal settings built in for weather satellite reception. This tutorial describes how to receive automatic picture transmissions (APT) from NOAA weather satellites using Gqrx SDR, record them to a WAV file, and finally decode the images using the free and open source Atpdec decoder. If you follow this guide you can end up with very nice results such as the one shown at the end.
Continue reading “Howto receive and decode NOAA APT images with the Funcube Dongle and Gqrx”
With both the frequency controller and FFT plot widgets in place gqrx was ready for the first on the air tests. The video below shows the first reception of the AO-27 amateur radio satellite during orbit 92436 and 92437, using the Funcube Dongle receiver that I use for portable space communication.
I have wanted to implement a simple APT decoder for the NOAA weather satellites in GNU Radio for quite some time now, in particular since the USRP equipped with a TVRX or WBX daughterboard and a GNU Radio FM receiver can be an extremely good receiver for this purpose. Today I have spent some time looking at the details of decoding APT and actually ended up with a working prototype implemented using the GNU Radio Companion.
Up until now, users of Gpredict could click on a satellite in any view to make that satellite selected. For most views, selecting a satellite meant highlighting it and showing some additional info about it, or for the case of single satellite view to display the data for that satellite. In case you are not familiar with the terms module and view in Gpredict, a module is a logical object which groups a number of satellites and a ground station together, while views are the display widgets used to visualize the satellite data in different ways like map, list, polar plot, etc. A module can have any number of views laid out in a grid.
Continue reading “Module-wide satellite selection in Gpredict”
Sunday, April 10, 2011 we met at OZ7SAT to start working on our antennas. The weather is becoming better and we have a few plans for upgrading the antenna farm at AMSAT OZ headquarters.
This is the last 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 good old Fuji FO-29 and the recording was made in JO45KG during orbit 71777.
Continue reading “FO-29 satellite reception with Funcube Dongle and Arrow antenna”
This is the seventh 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 HO-68 / XW-1 and the recording was made in JO45KG during orbit 5791.
Continue reading “HO-68 CW beacon with Funcube Dongle and Arrow antenna”