Author: John Cooke

The QO-100 narrow band transponder was opened for experiments this afternoon, prior to the official inauguration on Thursday. I simply had to have a look!

There we are! Not strong, but clearly visible.

A nice sunny day with no wind today – ideal to set the dish up outdoors and see if my simple and very cheap setup can detect signals from the Es’hail 2 OSCAR-100 package.

The answer is – yes!

I couldn’t wait for Monday when the wind will be down and weather expected to be good – I set up the Octagon LNB on the dish and pointed it out through the window. Tricky to point, but worth trying!

With the bias tee providing 12V down the LNB feed it was time to set up and test things. My plan is to see if I can receive signals from Es’hail 2 with a really simple system, consisting of the 60cm dish plus LNB, an RTL-SDR dongle, and a Raspberry Pi running Gqrx.

I have already used the RTL-SDR plus Raspberry Pi setup to receive Funcube in the 144MHz band, so had the software already set up (fortunately I always document how I do stuff, otherwise I would never have remembered how to set it up!). Here’s a screenshot of the system looking at a test signal on the LNB:

I’ve had no time to make proper progress on the deep space project recently. However the launch of Es’hail 2 in November made me think about another step along the way. I have a steerable dish (even though it’s not yet computer controlled), so I can steer it towards geostationary satellites easily!

The Es’hail beacon and transponders will allow for some useful tests; and Brian GM8BJF gave an interesting talk at the Lothians club recently showing how it could be done. So the first step is to make a bias tee for a LNB:

I found a useful screened box on the IF section of an old microwave unit, and have made a very simple bias tee to squirt 12V up to the LNB.