Back in August I read about MLA-30 a (very) cheap active loop antenna that was said to be at least a good one, if not even as good as the more expensive “original” loops. I wanted to test how well it might perform here at my city home in the middle of huge QRM and…
From APT to LRPT
On July 5 2019 the Russian Meteor M N2-2 weather satellite was successfully launched into orbit. Unlike NOAA satellites Meteor uses LRPT to transmit pictures down. Main difference between APT and LRPT is that APT is fully analog while LRPT uses digital data transfer. APT is very easy to receive and I have been using my…
“Some minor adjustments…”
Well, not that minor after all. I decided to do a full re-installation to my antennas, locate them to a different place and also add some new ones too. The original concept was that I had a small antenna mast on the roof, about 7 meter high. Now the new idea was to remove everything…
The All New remote RIG – Part 1.2 – “Testing with APT reception”
One of the first thing ever I did with a computer and a radio was to try to receive APT weather satellite telemetry and data. As I’m creating brand new system I wanted to test how my new shiny system can handle APT reception without any modification to the antenna or LNA but only the…
The All New remote RIG – Part 1.1 “Testing the HF shield”
One problem in my system is that I need to power it using cheap switched-mode power adapters. They are – well, cheap, universal, small, easy to get – and a huge source of wideband HF interference. The best solution would be to replace all these power supplies with real transformers and linear regulators, but for…
The All New remote RIG – Part 1 “The POC”
I had a plan to create all new remote Rig already during 2018, but due to some problems to get parts to it (the main computer) this has now been moved to be “The Project – 2019”. The Idea: * Fully remote controlled – power supplies included * Windows 10 based main computer * RaspberryPi…
UHF Satcom pirates, what are these!?
Summer 2018 I read about UHF-Satcom pirates. RTL-SDR.COM explains: “The UHF-Satcom band is anywhere between 243 – 270 MHz and contains fairly strong signals from many several US satellites that can be received with a simple antenna. Some of the satellites are simple repeaters without security, and pirates from Mexico and South America often hijack…
Oldies from archive: DDH reception via SpyServer link!
After SpyServer was published my hobby took a huge leap as now I was able to stream the IQ data directly from the remote antenna to my local shack using just kbits of internet bandwidth instead several megabits and full Windows RemoteDesktop session. Spyserver also gave me a change to create a separate stream to…
Oldies from archives: SYNOP reception!
It seems that I have recorded some videos about my early test with the system back in 2015. This time it was about SYNOP, those funny sounding HF transmissions that sounds like a morse code after some Quattro-Espresso’s. Receiver (HW): RTL-SDR dongle, HamItUp converter, LongWire antenna, LNA4HF LNAReceiver (SW): SDR#Decoder (SW): MultiPSK
Thunder in Radio!
Have you ever wondered about how thunder looks like in receiver – it is something like this. This was recorded Friday, 13.Jul 2018 5:30pm in Finland, grid KP01tn. Radio was tuned to VLF frequency of 72,3Khz (AM). The delay between the radio interference (lines across the whole screen, left side of the video) and the…