Collaborate Disseminate
These days, affordable software defined radios (SDRs) have made huge swaths of the spectrum available to hobbyists. Whether you’re looking to sniff the data from that 433 MHz thermometer you’ve …read more Continue reading Discovery Dish Lets You Pick Up the Final Frontier
The amateur radio community has exploded with activity lately especially in the software-defined radio (SDR) area since it was found that a small inexpensive TV tuner could be wrangled to do what only expensive equipment was able to do before. …read more
Continue reading Monitor SpaceX Rocket Launches With Software-Defined Radio
When [Kenneth Keiter] took apart his Starlink dish back in November, he did his best to explain the high-level functionality of the incredibly complex device in a video posted to his YouTube channel. It was a fascinating look at the equipment, but by his own admission, he wasn’t the right …read more
Continue reading Starlink Satellite Dish X-Rayed to Unlock RF Magic Inside
While SpaceX’s constellation of Starlink satellites is nowhere near its projected final size, the company has enough of the birds zipping around in low Earth orbit to start a limited testing period they call the Better Than Nothing Beta. If you’re lucky enough to get selected, you have to …read more
Continue reading Literally Tearing Apart a SpaceX Starlink Antenna
The US Festival, held in 1982 and 1983, was the kind of music happening where you could watch bands on giant screens while grabbing some shade under a satellite dish. Continue reading Steve Wozniak’s US Festival Predicted the Melding of Tech and Music
Students from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research combined a commercial satellite dish, a satellite finder and an Arduino, and produced a workable radio telescope. The satellite dish provides the LNB (low noise block) and the associated set-top box is used only for power. Their LNB employs an aluminum foil shield to block extraneous signals.
In addition to the hardware, the team built Python software to analyze the data and show several practical applications. They used known geostationary satellites to calibrate the signal from the finder (digitized by the Arduino) to determine power per unit voltage. They also …read more
Continue reading Listen to the Sun, Saturn, and the Milky Way with Your Own Radio Telescope
Satellite dishes are a common site these days, although admittedly most of them are Ku- and Ka-band dishes. The older C-band dishes are still around, though, just less frequently in people’s yards. [Greenish Apple] decide to cut the cable and start watching free TV so he built a C-band dish. The trick is, he made the dish out of wood.
The design is the offset type, not a prime focus dish–that is, the electronics are not in the center of the dish but on the side. Wood isn’t particularly good at reflecting RF, of course, so over the wooden skeleton, …read more
