First FCD experiments

I was feeling shattered after a hectic Christmas and being back at work, so it was nice with the New Year break to have a chance to recover. I have spent the weekend around the house and so had a good chance to try out my FUNCube Dongle (FCD) to do some proper satellite reception!

First off I spent a while calibrated my dongle using the excellent user guides available on the yahoo group, and getting to grips with the excellent but somewhat daunting SDR-Radio application. 

I fired up another of my ancient laptops a Sony Vaio, with XP and a pitiful 512MB of RAM. It is a nice machine, with an excellent large display but is a little underpowered. However undeterred with the prospect of some timely satellite passes I installed the necessary software and set off to the summerhouse at the top of the garden with my YAGI and a warm coat.

NOAA Weather Satellites

As I posted about back in October I was hoping if I did get an SDR radio to capture some of the APT images broadcast by the NOAA polar orbiting weather satellites. (Noaa 15, 18 and 19 are currently active)

The SDR-Radio application has the facility to decode the noaa images directly and along with it's built in satellite prediction and doppler correction features it was fairly easy to get some decent images. The huge advantage of the SDR system is being able to alter the bandwidth to accommodate the 34KHz deviation required (as you can see in the image above)

The image above was captured on 31st December at 13:26 GMT from NOAA-19 on 137.100MHz, the left image is the IR, the right being the visible image. If you click to enlarge you can clearly see Spain and the Balearic Islands at the bottom, the UK and most of Northern Europe is covered in dense cloud and is rapidly going into shadow. There is some noise, caused in part by pager transmissions and some course manual doppler correction.


ARISSat-1

As I posted before Christmas this little satellite is still going strong but it's time is very short as reaches the atmosphere. I have been able to receive four afternoon passes in the last two days

As you can see from the image shows, the FCD makes the entire ARISSat-1 2 meter downlink band plan available. The slight slope shows the doppler effect.

 

On the left you can clearly see the Morse code beacon and the BPSK telemetry segment and the right the FM voice and SSTV transmission. I am really really pleased to have successfully managed to decode some telemetry frames before she meets her fiery death. The decode was done after the passes by processing the recorded IQ wav file. I probably have just one more day to have a chance to try to decode some live telemetry and hopefully forward it via the internet to ARISS.

It goes without saying I have some excellent audio and decoded a couple of SSTV images too.

I love my new toy!