Satellites heard today

I heard the following sats:

• SO-50 (08:03 GMT)
• HO-68 (09:30 GMT)
• CO-65 (09:53 GMT)
• FO-29 (10:33 GMT)
• ESTCube1 (11:26 GMT)
• ITUpSAT-1 (13:08 GMT)

Over the next few days I'll be improving my software to start to decode the beacon signals. I can already do most of the modes, its more a case of just making it less of a pain to work! It is based on GNUradio.

Messing around this morning picking up a few satellites with my cheap'n'cheerful RTLSDR receiver. The antenna is a 9 element yagi pointed directly up with a couple of mini-circuit amplifiers to get over the cable loss. Attached is a plot of the pass of FO-29 (orbit 82835). Time is vertical (about 3 minutes), and frequency is horizontal (about 192kHz bandwidth centred at around 435.9MHz). This image represents only a fraction of the actual data recorded which is around 12 minutes long and 1.5MHz in bandwidth. The data shown consists of the CW beacon on the left and downlink on the right including a number of SSB and CW signals.

Oddly no signals were heard in later passes from ESTCube-1 which I've heard on a number of previous occasions.

Introduction

So what I intend to do with this blog is document some of the RF projects & measurements I do. Expect graphs of power vs frequency for a whole bunch of amateur satellites and hopefully astronomical objects over the coming years. Just don't hold your breath for the next blog posting!!