“So now that we have a weather station at the clubhouse, why aren’t we broadcasting real-time weather thru APRS?” said John Zaruba K2ZA one day, signaling the start of another GCARC Skunkworks project. The weather station (a topic for another article) was up and running and its output could be viewed from a web server […]
For those unfamiliar with satellite operation, working DX is quite different from terrestrial radio. Band conditions don’t really matter since the stations that can be worked all must be within the footprint of the satellite. The satellite footprint is determined by the altitude of the satellite above the earth. It’s like shining a flashlight on […]
The clubhouse satellite station has had steady incremental upgrades over the past few years but one factor had remained constant – the antenna and rotator system. The antennas were 1980’s style Cushcraft units that were probably average at the time and gave reasonable but not outstanding performance. Since “outstanding” is a goal of the […]
With the plethora of new rocket technology these days it seems that someone is launching interesting new satellites every couple of days. Many of these are “microsats” the size of a Rubik’s cube and can be popped off of the top of a rocket or shot out of a slot on the International Space Station […]
Below are some images that were copied by the W2MMD Clubhouse satellite station from the W5LFL memorial SSTV project. Some were copied live from the satellite while others were recorded by the clubhouse station and the audio was uploaded to SatNOGS. I downloaded the SatNOGS audio and decoded it locally. This was an especially interesting […]
Building the Raspberry Pi NOAA Satellite Station After building the stationto receive the GOES geostationary weather satellite, constructing the NOAA satellite station was a relative breeze. The NOAA series of satellites (NOAA 15, 18 and 19) are much more similar to amateur satellites than the GOES satellite – they operate in the 137 mhz band, […]
The GCARC 2018 Field Day Satellite Station Field Day brings out the creativity in hams since we have to adapt our typical operating configurations and practices to a completely different setting. This was also true for the satellite team (K2QA, K2ZA, N3PUU, KD2RPE and WB2MNF) as we prepared for the 2018 event. Under Field Day […]
Updated 3/21/19 We’ve now installed the EZ-Lindenblad antenna (the QST version with modifications – the AMSAT alternative wasn’t available at build time) and found that it works quite well. Thanks to G0KLA’s recommendation we’ve set the Auto-Start function on, which will use the Doppler correction to follow the currently-visible satellite rather than searching the entire […]
Tonight on the Thursday night GCARC net there was some discussion about digipeating your signal thru the ISS and NO-84 satellite. This is detailed in the December 2018 issue of QST so I won’t repeat those details, but here’s a quick write-up of that process and how I made it work. Both NO-84 and the […]
SatNOGS is a great way for individuals tracking satellites to obtain telemetry from sites throughout the world, but apparently some of the ham satellite groups can’t get their telemetry directly from SatNOGS. Instead the users must download the audio files and upload them through the respective telemetry decoders. K2ZA and I spent some time today […]
