Astronauts on the International Space Stations have recently been having conversations with school students and one QSO was captured by our station on November 13. In this recording astronaut Serena Aunon-Chancellor answers questions from school students about the experience of being in space. We can only hear one side of the conversation (hence the periods of […]
How We Built the GOES Reception Project Updated 12/1/18 Building our functional GOES 16 receiver was a process of broad web research and cobbling together the experiences of many other successful experimenters. We found lots of individual articles on antenna selection, software, and many other topics, but nothing that really pulled everything together. Hopefully this […]
Many aircraft today carry ADS-B beacons that transmit their location along with other identifying information. This is transmitted on 1090 mhz and can be decoded by an SDR radio and software on a Raspberry Pi computer. The team at FlightAware uses this data for aircraft tracking and displays it on an annotated map that’s accessed […]
In preparation for a presentation at the GCARC 2018 Hamfest, here’s a description of the current configuration of the W2MMD satellite station. Hopefully these diagrams will be useful in understanding how everything fits together and is used. Voice Communication Here’s how the voice communication process works. The SDR Console program runs on the PC and […]
SatNOGS is a network of stations that report satellite telemetry to a central database. I’m just getting started in this but here’s what I’ve done so far. The whole SatNOGS project is designed to let amateurs build up a simple satellite station that will report telemetry. The website contains info on antennas, rotators, software and […]
An important aspect of remote control is the ability to point the antennas in the desired direction. Fortunately the PST Rotator program has client/server capability that will let you run a remote copy of the program that will control the rotator at the W2MMD QTH. The Server program is set to run automatically at W2MMD, […]
Lots of good tips from here: http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=&to=en&a=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.qsl.net%2Fpy4zbz%2Ffalconsat.htm Installed the HW Virtual Serial Port to create a COM port from the output of the Soundmodem HS. See additional WISP notes in https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2837525951324922303#allposts 8/2/18 – looks like possible success! I tried running WISP on a recorded SDR track – it listed the files that it had downloaded […]
Select satellite in Next Pass list Antennas – 70 cm on SDR; 2 meter on 847; preamp on Rotator set to track Satellite Doppler tracking set SDR set to WFM SDR recording set if desired FOR WISP ONLY: HW Serial port configured for COM6 – Login, change Port Name to COM6, URL and Port to […]
On an otherwise lousy day I got the FalconSat telemetry decoder working. It’s a 2-step process – you process the telemetry with the Soundmodem HS and the AGW-KISS program, which will write the telemetry files into the c:HamTempFalconsat folder. You then point the Telemetry decoder (see the Start menu) to that file and it will […]
So after a little more research I found that WISP isn’t the only program that can read the Falconsat data. UISS will also work using the 9600 baud modem. Here’s how it looks: Unfortunately transmitting isn’t as easy – you need to pipe the audio into the packet input port on the 847, and we […]
