I’ve always wanted some kind of callsign “sign” in my little shack. Over the years I’ve seen various signs, everything from as simple as a piece of paper against the wall to very meticulously wooden carved signs. When I recently got my hands on a new 3d printer I decided its time to make my…
Category: Project
Adventures with GreenCube Satellite
Introduction GreenCube is a new satellite that was designed by S5Lab and there are lots of interesting parts to this one. Most amateur radio satellites we usually play with is in Leo orbit, meaning its only a couple hundred kilometers away. The Greencube satellite is in Meo orbit with a distance of 5800+ km. This…
Adding Satellite Tracking to Portable Rotator
In the last post about my Portable Rotator for satellite use we got the basics working, we had a system where can send a command to set the Azimuth and Elevation by sending the following command: By sending those commands we can move the rotator to an Azimuth of 180 and Elevation of 57. This…
Beginning of Portable Satellite Tracker
When Zane (ZS5ZT) contacted me and offered me a heavy duty pan/title mechanism I jumped at the offer. Turns out it is a nice little gadget and I’m surprised that not more people have turned these into portable trackers. I have created a page documenting my build and experiments with it. The first information is…
QO-100 Dish Calibration Using Longmynd
Setting up your dish for QO-100 is always a fun challenge, especially if you are using it for the Wide Band transponder on QO-100. Larger dishes are more difficult to fine tune. I’ve been thinking about building the functionality into the Android Longmynd Client, but there is still a bit more work to be done…
Offline Oscar 100 Wideband Spectrum Monitor with SDR
If you have been playing with DATV on the Oscar 100 satellite, then hopefully you know all about the online Wideband Spectrum Monitor provided by the BATC. Its bad form to transmit without keeping an eye on the spectrum because you could be transmitting over someone else. But what if your internet is down, or…
Satellite Ground Station V1 – Part 2
In my previous post regarding my satellite ground station I chatted about the basic hardware and setup that I decided to go with. In this post I figured I would expand a bit more on the software side of what I hacked together. The concept is fairly simple. I have two rotators that need to…
Oscar 100 Wideband Spectrum Clock
I needed a clock for the shack and it seemed fitting to put something fun together. Since I’ve been busy playing with DATV on the Oscar 100 Satellite, I figured a clock that would also show the wideband spectrum activity would fit nicely. The spectrum data for the clock comes from the BATC Wideband Spectrum…
Satellite Ground Station V1 – Part 1
During one of our many lockdowns (because of COVID), I decided that I wanted to put up a semi-decent Satellite Ground station at my QTH. I’ve been playing with satellites for a while mostly using a handheld Yagi running around in the backyard all hours of the day and night. It was a bit of…