Saturday 12 November 2011

ARISSat-1 Morse beacon

This weekend there are a couple of excellent daytime flybys of ARISSat-1 predicted, passing very high in the sky.  Up till now I have been concentrating on the FM transmission on 145.950MHz which carries the voice messages, voice telemetry and the SSTV. The other signals from the satellite use SSB and CW modulation.

So this morning I left the loft discone and my Realistic PRO2006 with MMSSTV in the spare bedroom waiting for the pass while I took the borrowed Alinco DJ-X10, which has SSB capability, outside and using the Yagi antenna I built up last weekend had a go at getting some of the CW beacon on 145.919MHz

I got a decent signal as you can hear below, and using CWGet managed to decode some of the telemetry and the identification, but the high noise and doppler effect did cause some problems.


Arissat1 cw beacon by nerdsville

While I was doing this the SSTV system caught a lovely image

Can not wait till tomorrow for two almost overhead passes in the morning and then time to watch the Grand Prix!

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