Amateur Satellites
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Building Your Own Satellite: Where to Start?
I've been diving into the world of amateur satellites, and the idea of building one is absolutely thrilling! However, like any ambitious project, getting started can feel overwhelming. So, I wanted to gather some collective wisdom from this awesome community.
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Choosing Components: What are the must-have components for a basic satellite? Any recommendations on where to source them without breaking the bank?
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Learning Resources: What books, online courses, or tutorials have you found invaluable in understanding satellite design and operation?
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Software and Simulations: Are there any specific software tools or simulation programs you'd suggest for planning and testing satellite systems?
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Launching: What are the best options for getting a small satellite into orbit for amateurs? Has anyone here collaborated with organizations like SpaceX or Rocket Lab?
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Success Stories: I'd love to hear about your personal projects! What challenges did you face, and how did you overcome them? Pics and progress updates are always welcome!
Thanks in advance!
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NOAA-19 APT (Late Morning Pass, Lincoln NE Area)
RTLv3 + FM Bandstop + Wideband LNA + Dipole Antenna. One of my best captures yet, I think!
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LRPT from Meteor-M No. 2-4 received with RTL-SDRv3 and handheld dipole using SatDump on Android.
Both received and decoded in SatDump on Android. The 321 composite PNG is 65MB, so I compressed it... and then Imgur compressed it even further so there's some extra compression artifacts, but anyway.
And a note: Look4Sat app seems to have wrong TLE for M No. 2-4. Thankfully there was a similar pass to one shown, just 15 minutes later and more to the west. TLE on N2YO.com is right.
Edit: Ran the decoder again with baseband. It removed the lines from middle.
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My first successful APT image reception
Captured from Poland on April 10th at 17:00 UTC, looks like channel A switched to IR mid scan. The satellite is NOAA-15.
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ISS SSTV
It's transmitting on 145.8MHz FM in the 2m HAM band times (from amsat-uk): Fri Oct 27 at 12:15 GMT – Sun Oct 29 at 18:50 GMT Tue Oct 31 at 10:05 GMT – Wed Nov 01 at 18:10 GMT
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My attempt at decoding NOAA-15 telemetry
The telemetry for the NOAA POES satellites is in the TIP data along with the HIRS and SEM data. The content is not known, but the format is. At least everything on the star nesdis page should be in there, including the AVHRR scan motor current I was looking for.
I wrote a program to dump this telemetry to CSV and found the one column that rose at the same rate as the scan motor should.
It's not a perfect match, NOAA probably multiplies it by some unknown value to find the actual current, and my data is only from when the satellite was overhead, so it's a bit low resolution ! official NOAA data: ! There are still hundreds of unknown values that I haven't and have no way of figuring out, here is the raw CSV data if anyone is interested: link It's concatenated from months of data, so it's full of skips, there is a millisecond timestamp on the first column, but it's out a few hours and sometimes corrupted. Some fields are also super commutated still.
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What could this satellite be? Seen on 2023-08-26T09:43:04Z in Slovakia at 137.71MHz. Bandwidth when modulated is 8kHz. Signal lasted a little over 4 min. (Full waterfall, baseband recording in post.)
Video
Click to view this content.
Waterfall: ! Click to view image directly
Baseband recording (cut with SDRAngel using FileSink)
When modulated, it looks like Orbcomm mobile telephony, but in that case the data bursts happen more often and there's no visible carrier. I also didn't find anything corresponding in the Happysat's Deadsat list.
What could it be? Zombie Orbcomm satellite or something else?
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Last night, NOAA 18 APT had a blank channel A
I wonder what NOAA is doing? They did this on 2023-08-28 too.
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I made a status page for the 137MHz weather satellites
github.com GitHub - thomasdouwes/137MHz-Weather-Satellite-StatusContribute to thomasdouwes/137MHz-Weather-Satellite-Status development by creating an account on GitHub.
I made a status page for the 137MHz weather satellites (like happysat's meteor one) Hopefully this is useful to someone, I think I went overboard on the details but maybe that's helpful
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APT image from NOAA-15, currently with AVHRR scanner motor malfunction, plus raw image, waterfall screenshot, audio sample and DSB images as bonus.
The main image in post was decoded with WXtoIMG as both noaa-apt and SatDump fail to synchronize it correctly.
Unprocessed image from noaa-apt: ! Compatibility image link
Waterfall: ! Compatibility image link There you can see some breaks, the noticeable horizontal lines.
Which sounds like so (note: the waterfall shown above isn't from the same time as audio): ! Compatibility audio link
And the bonus, DSB images: ! Compatibility image link Channels 1-20 are left-to-right then bottom.
And also AVHRR scan motor current as of today: ! Compatibility image link
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Today's image from NOAA-18 (APT). Also, what happened with DSB (check post)?
On the DSB:
I also wanted to record the NOAA-18's direct sounder broadcast at 137.35MHz, but it just suddenly cut off and haven't re-appeared: ! Direct image link
What's with that?
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July 5th: My first attempt at LRPT with Meteor M N2-3. It ain't much, but there's a lack of posts
Captured with RTL-SDRv3 and V-Dipole. Processed in SatDump (Android).
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meteor + NOAA composite from first day of meteor-m2 3 LRPT
This is a composite of one meteor LRPT pass and 4 NOAA APT passes (with false colour) from 2023-07-28, the first day of meteor-m2 3 LRPT. I resized and JPEG compressed this image to not kill your internet connection but the original 109MB image is here.
All composites here are produced with SatDump.
Some more composites of this day are below (lower resolution). All of the titles go the the original PNGs. with map overlay: !
and with NOAA HIRS from DSB because why not: ! longer HIRS !
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Hello
Hello there. I used to run a small instance for a few of my hobbies but I ended up shutting it down before anyone actually used it. Most of the other topic on there have already moved to custom instances or communities on big instances but this one hasn't yet. I dislike opening yet another community on lemmy.world but I don't think it's suitable to use a personal instance for a community so I ended up making it on lemmy.world anyway. It's probably for the best because my server is already overloaded, but what do you think? should I host it or just leave it here?