Sunday 11 November 2012

A Frustrating Afternoon

I have recently took possession a 'new' laptop, a nice Lenovo Thinkpad. with a Core i3 and Windows 7 Professional.

I was trying to use it this afternoon with the FUNCube Dongle and having no luck at all getting it to work! I had planned to decode some NOAA-APT transmissions and hastily reverted to my older laptop only to discover that it wasn't receiving anything either.

In the end I traced it down to a faulty BNC coupler! I remember it was raining last time I used it and it did get slightly damp, so suspect there is some corrosion. Unfortunately by the time I had sorted it out I missed most of the overhead pass of NOAA-19.

I did manage to get two poor decodes of NOAA-18 and NOAA-15 but as you can see I was struggling with fading signals and interference.

NOAA-15 11-Nov-2012

NOAA-18 11-Nov-2012

What was interesting, and not seen before was the visible image (on the right) seems to change when it goes into darkness.
Damn you!

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