Peter Goodhall, 2E0SQL - M3PHP » space

Reinstated QFH Weather Antenna

Peter — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:31:59 +0000

After reconnecting up the weather satellite receiver (RX2) and connecting it up to the Diamond V2000 vertical to decode the NOAA APT satellite passes it was finally time to put a dedicated antenna back up, in the form of a quadrifilar helicoidal antenna (QFH) this antenna hasn’t been used in about 4 years so I was surprised it worked perfectly. the results from using the V2000 weren’t that bad it would decode passes just below Iceland down to the top of Spain.

With the QFH its decoding from well above the top of Iceland all the way down to Algeria, and best of all the images are mostly noise free. the antenna is only about 10 feet off the ground attached to the rose arch in the garden.

You can have a look at the images at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/apt/daily/ their uploaded a couple of minutes after each pass automatically by the software.

APT Weather Satellites

Peter — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:25:52 +0000

After about 3 years of not decoding APT weather satellite pictures, I decided 1 weeks ago to setup the Rig RIGSAT RX2 again and connected it up to the Diamond V2000, for the software I decided instead of using the Time-step software to use a free application called APT Decoder which can track, decode and process the satellite pass without any involvement from a human.

Afterwards it has the ability to upload the decoded image and provides an RSS feed which can be subscribed to, which is handy as you can view the image on any type of device as long as you have Internet access.

After a week and a half of decoding the results have been relativity good considering its not using a crossed or QFH style antenna, images do have noticeable noise on them but there still usable. and the software has performed without any issues.

You can find the latest images at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/apt/daily/

ISS Voice & SSTV

Peter — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:03:29 +0000

Today turned out to be rather interesting, upon getting up Dad (M3JFM) informed me that there was a ISS pass at around 11:30 UTC, so armed with my Olympus DM-20 digital voice recorder I headed into the shack to record the pass using the FT-7800 and V2000 vertical again. I took the audio out of the speaker jack and put it right into the recorder and left it to record what ever it received

Mean while Dad set out to listen for the ISS using his VX150 handheld and a SOTA 2m 3el beam, to our surprise this time it wasn’t transmitting SSTV but was being manned by one the guys on board! perhaps if I knew before hand I might have tried to get a QSO!

The audio file will be here soon!

After about 6 minutes the pass was over but we had a blast receiving We then caught a later pass around at around 13:48 this time round it was SSTV so after the audio was recorded we fed the audio back into Dads laptop and using HRDs DM780 SSTV decoder we got the following two pictures.

ISS Talks to Budbrooke Primary School

Peter — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:42:21 +0000

Earlier today the International Space Station, had an arranged contact with the Budbrooke Primary School in Warwick. I was lucky enough to be able to hear the ISS on 145.800 for most of the pass using the FT7800 and a V2000 vertical.

You can listen to the audio file ISS%20Edited.mp3 I have removed all the excess noise too, the next thing I’m wanting to do is receive the SSTV picture hopefully tomorrow if I’m lucky!