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…
QO100 DATV Decoding with SDRangel and SDR
Introduction SDRangel recently had an update (v7.8.1) with a couple of enhancements and fixes. One of the updates was an addition of adding a dial to flip through DATV standard symbol rates. It’s not a big change, but it has inspired me to download it and try to decode some DATV transmissions from QO-100. Being…
QO-100 High Speed Modem and Weather Station
Overview If you have been active on QO-100 then you would by now know about the High Speed Multi Media Beacon. The beacon sends high speed data within the maximum allowed bandwidth of 2.7 kHz. I’ve previously done a post on development information as well as some tips and tricks to get it going on…
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…
PlutoSDR on Network via Raspberry PI
I’ve been playing recently with the QO-100 high speed modem, its been working well, but one of the smaller issues I’ve been having is that every now and again I get bad packets. I’ve been tweaking all kinds of settings on my SDR Console as per the documentation and while I receive most packets it…
QO-100 High Speed Modem – Info/Tips/Development
The QO-100 High Speed Modem is a very exciting development from Amsat-DL and DJ0ABR. The modem itself allows for sending all kinds of different data including files, images and even experimental voice. The QO-100 Narrowband Transponder has a multimedia beacon currently running where you can receive and decode lots of interesting information using the High…
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…
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…