Todays progress

I've actually made a fair bit of progress on the software side of things. I can now kick off the GnuRadio bits'n'bobs as required from the GUI and then control them with XMLRPC. This allows me to do the Doppler corrections in real time - as you can see from the attached picture of the pass of ISS a few minutes ago. I'm having some issues with processes & zombies, bit hopefully I'll get to the problem that is causing me some robustness issues over the coming week.

Has anyone seen any recent TLEs for AENEAS?

Todays sats

I attempted listened to the following:

• HO-68 (09:50 GMT)
• CO-65 (10:05 GMT)
• FO-29 (10:30 GMT)
• CubeBug-1 (10:54 GMT) - Not heard
• ESTcube1 (11:27 GMT) - Not heard
• SO-50 (12:44 GMT)
• ITUpSAT (13:04 GMT)
• AENEAS (14:35 GMT)

The equipment was the same as last week. Times are approx AOS.

Started to restructure my software to start to allow me to do real time doppler corrections and then decode it - however its going to take a few more weeks of coding 'till I get something useful.

I ordered a comb generator from AMSAT-UK, which turned up yesterday. Hopefully this will allow me to quantify the drift I think I'm seeing in my RTLSDR (E4000) USB dongle. I started to assemble it but the SMD components have slowed me down.

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!!