Messages from space

Messages decoded from the FUNcube-1 satellite

FUN cubed

I have just received my first telemetry from the FUNcube satellite, a.k.a. OSCAR 73. It was a piece of cake, one of the easiest things in ham radio I have done. What helped make it easy was that I was using a FUNcube Dongle Pro as the receiver (thanks, John!) . The FUNcube dashboard software supports it out of the box. No drivers to install or soundcards to configure. It was a piece of cake.The Dongle automatically tunes to the right frequency.

Of course, the whole project has been designed to be used by teachers with no previous experience of this kind of stuff. So you would expect it to be easy for a seasoned radio ham!

The FUNcube Dashboard software

The whole thing went something like this:

1. Download and install .NET Framework 4.0 from Microsoft.
2. Download and install FUNcube Dashboard from http://data.funcube.org.uk/
3. Register your call at the FUNcube data warehouse https://warehouse.funcube.org.uk/.
4. Download, read and follow the instructions (PDF files) from the FUNcube site.
5. Connect dual band colinear to FUNcube Dongle.

Sit back and wait for a pass.

 I was not present when the satellite went over as I was downstairs having lunch.

There are no suitable passes over this location this evening or tonight so I will have to wait until tomorrow for another try. Unfortunately apart from an FT-817 and the dual band vertical I don't have equipment that can operate 2m ans 70cm so I'll have to leave tryi ng to work through the transponder to someone else.

NASA seeks help tracking satellite

NASA has asked amateur radio operators for help to determine if a recently launched satellite is operating. The NanoSail-D satellite was ejected automatically from the Fast Affordable Scientific and Technology Satellite, FASTSAT on Wednesday, January 19. NASA needs reports of the beacon telemetry to determine if it is operating correctly. The beacon signal is on 437.270MHz using standard AX.25 packet so APRS and packet radio operators with 70cm capability should be able to receive it.

Predictions for the satellite can be found here. Reception reports can be submitted here. Full text of the NASA press release here.

Work FM Satellites

I came across this website while reading a thread about the new Kenwood TH-D72. It claims to be the best website for current information about working FM satellites. It looks pretty good, but I really need to find the time to look through all the information. There's a blog, too.

The trouble with this hobby is that there is so little time and so many interesting, challenging things you can do!

ISS success

Over the last few days Lynn, KJ4ERJ has been adding some very cool features to APRSISCE/32 which I've been helping to test. The ISS packet digipeater is still operating so as there were several good passes during the daytime I've been playing on it as well.

Today I managed to hear my own beacon repeated back by the space station, and this time it was also gated to the internet by TF8TTY so my call showed up on the map of stations heard through the ISS at ariss.net. I also managed to send a couple of messages through the bird. Tim, G4VXE was impressed to receive a greeting relayed via the space station. I also managed a two-way exchange with Marc, PD4U, which I think counts as an actual satellite contact.

Of course, whilst it's fun to bounce radio waves off a satellite it isn't a very practical method of communication. The ISS is the best QTH ever and it can hear all the activity on a frequency at the same time, so communication is only possible if not too many people use it. Lots of messages never get anywhere because they are sent at the same time as messages from other people which you can't avoid transmitting over because you can't hear them. The space station decodes only the strongest, so turning the power up improves your chances of success quite a bit. You can get through the ISS using a hand-held VX-8, but only at 4 o'clock in the morning when most sane people are asleep, unless you are incredibly lucky.

The new feature in APRSISCE that I mentioned is the ability to open separate windows so you can track individual stations at a more detailed mapping level. Lynn has called this Multi-Track(TM) and he thinks it will be very popular with emergency communications teams who will be able to see the entire area of the event in the main window and see exactly where individual team members are at the same time. It's only available in the development (beta test) versions at the moment, though.

SatGates needed

The International Space Station has had its packet BBS / digipeater active for the last few days on 145.825MHz. Noel G4PEW asked me in a short APRS chat last night if I had tried listening to it. It had been a long time since I tried bouncing anything off the ISS as I got fed up with checking if the station was operational and finding that it wasn't, so I decided to give it a go to break the monotony of nothing much happening terrestrially.

There was a good pass this afternoon and I received ten stations. I even received my own digipeated beacon and a copy of my reply to GM0ICF's message to ALL. Unfortunately my own transmissions didn't show up on the map and list of stations that worked through the ISS at ariss.net as it appears that I was the only station gating the signals from the space station to the internet, as the list above shows (you'll need to click on it to enlarge it enough to be readable.)

I was using APRSIS32 to send the beacons and messages and I guess that it didn't gate my digipeated packets as having been received via the ISS because it had already sent them to the internet direct at the time I sent them.

I'm surprised that none of the other stations sending signals up to the space station were gating them during the receive periods. We aren't talking about important communications here, just seeing if it can be done, but it would be nice to have the proof of it afterwards. Come on, chaps, play the game and get your gateways working!

Bouncing off the ISS

There was recently a change of crew at the International Space Station and one result of that has been the reappearance after a long absence of the packet radio digipeater on 145.825MHz. When the Space Station passes over you can receive some very strong signals from it. I have decoded APRS beacons on a VX-8 handheld standing on a window sill inside the shack. But it is even better to use the main station, then you can see the positions of the stations you received on a map.

When using the ISS you need to use different settings to what you would use for terrestrial APRS. Digipeating, if enabled, must be turned off. You want to be connected to APRS-IS so you can gate received packets to the internet, but you don't want to send anything received from the internet out to the ISS. You probably don't want to display data from the internet on the map, to leave it clear to show those stations received by the radio. If you want to transmit through the ISS yourself you must also change the APRS path to "ARISS".

After thinking that we really need an ISS option in APRSISCE/32 for this it occurred to me that all I needed to do was make a copy of the program in a new folder, then I could change the settings however I wanted without affecting the copy I use for terrestrial APRS. It worked fine. It was fun to see the stations heard via the satellite show up on the map, although when the map is zoomed out to cover such a large area the icons are hard to see. It was also amusing to see that the icon for the ISS's own beacon was a bicycle. Perhaps someone should tell NASA!

After several abortive attempts to get my own beacon digipeated by the Space Station I set the transceiver to Narrow FM and got through on the first attempt using just 10W to my 300ohm ribbon cable Slim Jim in the attic. The proof is in the map of stations heard through the ISS at ariss.net.

Not a very useful activity perhaps, but fun to try.

A couple of setbacks

Computers and radio really don't mix. I was trying to connect the FT-817 to the shack computer. I plugged the USB cables into the back of the PC, then as I lifted the cables vertical to feed them behind the shelf unit I heard the noise level on 2 metres come up quite clearly. I could probably reduce the noise using clip-on ferrites but any more noise than I already have is unwelcome. I think I might give up the computer altogether and go back to paper logging!

I also proved today that it isn't possible to work satellites with indoor antennas. Yesterday I tried receiving AO-51 with the 3/4 wave vertical I made, but I got a readable signal for only a few seconds. Today I tried the 6 element Yagi I made a few weeks ago which received signals off the Moon when used outdoors. Pointing it at the satellite from inside the shack I again heard only a few seconds of signal from the satellite. I think there is just too much attenuation at 70cm to use indoor antennas, so satellite operation is out of the question.

I could probably combine the 6-element 70cm and the Moxon 2m antenna to make a portable hand held antenna for satellite use. But whilst it would be an interesting challenge to make a satellite contact using the FT-817 and a hand held antenna out of doors I had really hoped to be able to do it from inside the shack.

Hearing an old friend

I have been listening when time permits to see whether I can hear - and perhaps even work through - amateur satellites with my attic antennas. Today I caught a couple of passes of Amsat Oscar 7 operating in Mode B.

Oscar 7 is the first and only satellite I have ever worked through. It was launched in 1974 and I used it during the summer of 1975 when I was home from university. In those days I used Oscar 7's Mode A (2m up, 10m down) running 50W from an Icom IC201 with an amplifier to a 5 element Jaybeam and receiving using some kind of wire antenna and a Yaesu FRG-7 receiver.

Oscar 7 is more than 35 years old and the fact that it can be used in 2010 is interesting. The satellite failed in 1981 after all the batteries failed short-circuit and that was the last anyone expected to hear of it. But in 2002 its beacon signal was heard once again after one of the batteries went open-circuit allowing the full power from the satellite's solar panels to be used to run the transponders. Jan King, W3GEY, who built Oscar 7 in his garage all those years ago, wrote about his feelings on hearing his 'baby' again - it was clearly an emotional experience.

The satellite now comes on when it is in sunlight and goes off when it is in eclipse. It is pot luck which of its modes it uses when it comes on, but it mostly appears to be Mode B, the downlink of which can be heard on 145.950MHz USB plus or minus 20kHz. You can receive it quite well using a good 2m vertical - in fact I hear it better on my Slim Jim than I do on the SuperMoxon due to the fact that the latter is very narrow band and tuned to the low end of the 2m band.

You would hear the Mode A downlink on 29.450MHz plus or minus 50KHz. (Both transponders are linear and can support multiple contacts at the same time within the bandwidth, unlike an FM repeater.)

I am finding it difficult to find out which of the many amateur satellites now in orbit are usable for communication and when they are actually available. Many of the websites giving information about how to use satellites are well out of date and give details of satellites that are no longer operational. To add to the confusion some sites use names like "Hamsat" or "Echo" while others use the Oscar designation. So you may find the links below useful if you would like to try listening for Oscar 7.

N2YO has an excellent site for all satellite enthusiasts which provides real time Oscar 7 satellite tracking and allows you to generate predictions for future passes. It's worth logging in to the site so it can remember your location co-ordinates. You should also tick the box "Check to show ALL passes (visible and not visible)" - confusingly this refers to when the satellite is visible to the naked eye, not when it is above the radio horizon.

The Oscar Satellite Status Page lets people enter reports of satellites heard so you can see which ones are operational and get an idea of which mode Oscar 7 is operating in at the moment. Finally Planet Emily has a lot of information about Oscar 7 including a log where people can record contacts made through this antique piece of space hardware.

Satellite antenna

I attempted this morning to make a 5/8 wave ground plane antenna for 70cm out of some solid copper mains cable and a chassis mount SO-239 connector. I tried two designs for the radiating element with a coil at the bottom, but both gave "High SWR" from the FT-817 and were so far away from a match that there seemed no hope of getting anywhere. My SWR analyzer doesn't go above 200MHz so that wasn't any help in finding out what was wrong.

After these abortive attempts I decided to straighten out the coil and make a 3/4 wave ground plane instead. This gave a perfect match with barely perceptible reflected power being shown on the SWR meter.

The four radials are each 165mm (6.5in.) long and the vertical element 483mm (19in.) The radials need to be horizontal for the best match, not slanting down as they usually are for a quarter wave vertical.

Hopefully I will be able to receive satellite downlinks with this. There are no 70cm repeaters in this area and no 70cm activity that I know of so it will not be much use for anything else.

Sunspots bad news for sat-nav users

Whilst many ham radio blogs have commented happily on the effects of an increase in solar activity, true to form the BBC has managed to find a downside. A story has just appeared on the BBC website telling us that the increase in sunspots will make our sat-navs go haywire leading presumably to airliners crashing, lorries falling off bridges and walkers getting lost in the mountains.

There was news story a few months ago (yes, this was actually on the national BBC TV evening news) that the Earth could collide with Mars in a billion years time. Don't let the fact that we won't merely be dead but extinct when it happens spoil a good doomsday story. I sometimes wonder if the BBC is the reason Britain is becoming a nation of binge drinkers on antidepressants.

My memory is not what it was, but I seem to recall that people did use GPS during the last solar maximum and nothing catastrophic happened. If you actually read the story, the effect of this increased solar activity is that your reported position could be inaccurate by up to ten metres. Occasionally. Gosh, better start preparing for this now, then.

A far bigger problem with satellite navigation systems is that the maps are inaccurate with the result locally that vehicles are still being directed along routes that would take them over bridges that are closed or even washed away after last year's flooding. Now that really is a news story.

Signals from space

The September issue of the RSGB's excellent RadCom was awaiting me on return from holiday. It contained an article about two new atmospheric research micro-satellites, Castor and Pollux, which transmit telemetry using AX.25 packet in the 2m band. This piqued my interest enough to try to have a go at receiving them.

The tiny satellites consist of two 19in. diameter spheres separated by an insulator, which form the two halves of the 2m antenna. There is a super photograph of the two satellites, taken shortly after they were launched at the end of July from the Space Shuttle Endeavour, which can be found on many of the websites that carry information about the launch.

My first problem was to find some way to decode 2m packet. I used to have a copy of MixW, but I had not used it for a couple of years and when I tried, it crashed immediately after start-up. I deleted it and tried installing a new copy but it came up in German! I also realised that I no longer had the registration code for it. So I decided to look for another solution.

I found it at SV2AGW's website. I installed the AGW Packet Engine (AGWPE) and then AGWMonitor to receive the telemetry. Setting up the Packet Engine to receive packet using the sound card is not very intuitive, and in fact I gave up the first time and spent another couple of hours trying to find a backup copy of my MixW installation, without success. Then I found an excellent step-by-step guide to setting up AGWPE with a sound card by KC2RLM that got me going. AGWMonitor requires AGWPE, and the trick is to put it into the Startup Programs option of AGWPE so that the monitor is launched directly after you start the engine.

I used the N2YO Live Real Time Satellite Tracking website to find out when the satellites are visible from my QTH. This shows that they currently pass over very late at night and during the small hours of the morning, when I am asleep, so I left everything on overnight to see what I could receive. The first time, all I got were a number of packets from the International Space Station, RS0ISS.

This morning, I received one packet from Pollux-1 and one from Castor-1 (which confusingly identifies itself as KD4HBO-1 in the packet header.) Just for fun, I decoded the packets using the telemetry decoders written by Mike Rupprecht, DK3WN - though to be honest, the information didn't mean anything to me. Captured telemetry should be sent to ande@juno.nrl.navy.mil and QSL cards will be sent to anyone who submits data.

I also received many more packets from the ISS, which uses the same frequency of 145.825MHz. The result of this is that I have now become interested in trying to make packet radio contacts through the ISS digipeater!

What a great hobby this is! There seems to be no limit to the different things you can try to do with amateur radio!

Outdated information

The Internet is a fantastic resource for radio amateurs. Without it, it would be much harder to get information on different aspects of the hobby. But the amount of outdated information that has never been either removed or updated can result in a lot of time wasted.

I have been trying to find out about amateur FM satellites currently operation. My searches turned up several pages about the South African satellite Sunsat, one of which states that it "recently commenced operation." Another article on how to work your first satellite gives a detailed description of how to work Sunsat, despite the fact that it apparently ceased operation some time in 2001!

A search for the current ARISS operational schedule found pages listing a schedule for 2001, and another for 2005!

Is it too much to ask for people who post information on the web to take it down again when it is no longer valid, if it cannot be updated?

Fake Diamond?

One reason why I decided to buy a Kenwood TH-F7E was that I thought it would be fun to try some FM satellite operation. I realized that I would need a better antenna for this than the supplied rubber duck, so after spending a lot of time comparing reviews of different dual band whip antennas with SMA connectors, and matching them with what was available at a reasonable cost here in the UK, I decided to order a Diamond SRH536 from PRJ Communicatons, who trade on eBay.

At least, that's what I thought I was ordering, though to be fair to PRJ, nowhere in their advertisement do they state that the antenna they sell is made by Diamond. However, the model number and spec are identical, and the antenna looks the same.

When I received the antenna the packaging states that it is made by Sharman multiCOM Ltd and the model number is WTA-SRH536. The name Diamond is missing from the antenna base as well. So I am guessing that it is not made by the same manufacturer, and its performance may not be the same.

As I am still awaiting the TH-F7E I decided to try the antenna out on my FT-817 using an adapter. The SWR is not great - three bars at full power on either band. Performance on 2m seems to be about 3dB down on a quarter wave telescopic whip, and also down on the FT-817's stock rubber duck. This is the difference between accessing a local repeater and not accessing it.

My SRH536 appears to work better on 70cm than the telescopic whip shortened to 5/8 of a wavelength, though that is based entirely on a field strength meter measurement - there are no 70cm repeaters within reach of this location. I couldn't compare it with the FT-817 rubber duck because the radio complains of high SWR whenever it is used.

I'm disappointed with the performance on 2m, which is the uplink frequency for the satellites, and wonder whether a different whip antenna would have performed better. I know that a short dual-band hand-held Yagi is the best solution for portable satellite operation. But that isn't portable enough for me, so I really wanted the best performing dual band whip antenna to use with a small HT.

Weather Satellite Images

I used to receive and decode weather satellite images from the NOAA APT satellites and publish the images on this site, but I gave up about a year ago when I wanted to improve the ham radio antennas in my small attic and there was nowhere left to put the QFH. Out of the blue, I received an email from Paul Dransfield at the local high school, Cockermouth School, who informed me that they are receiving APT images there. A new satellite, NOAA 19, has just been launched, but unfortunately it is transmitting on the highest channel, close to the local pagers, and he is experiencing bad interference.

I wasn't able to help him with this, other than to point out that the receiver he is using, the R2FX, is rather poor in that respect. But visitors to my site who miss my images might like to see the ones Cockermouth School is publishing on their rather fine Weather Centre website.

Satellites collide

I see in the news that two satellites, one Russian and one American, have collided over Siberia. "The Russian satellite was out of control" claims the Americans. Of course. It's always the other driver's fault. Hopefully they will be able to claim on their insurance.