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: Satellites
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…
Practical DATV Network/Internet Streaming Experiments – Part 1
Background Whenever you deal with media be it audio or video, streaming it over a network or the internet always comes up. The amateur radio television hobby is no different. We are creating content that is being transmitted over various platforms including satellites. The QO-100 satellites has also opened up these kind of experiments for…
Adalm Pluto Rev C/D Configuration for DATV
I recently got a new Adalm Pluto (PlutoSDR) which I wanted to setup for DATV transmissions on the Oscar 100 Satellite. Its the new revision C/D (It says revision C on the Box, but shows revision D on the circuit board). Its been a while since I’ve setup my previous one which was an older…
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…
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…