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Radio Amateur Copies Signal from Mars-Orbiting Satellite

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Re: Radio Amateur Copies Signal from Mars-Orbiting Satellite

#7

Post by geocrasher »

This is nothing short of incredible. Radio is hard, even at HF (1-30mhz). It's very forgiving at HF though, and so is very approachable. This is where I spend my ham radio time dabbling and hacking away at things. VHF is harder, and UHF an order of magnitude harder. But 8-12Ghz? That's not for mere mortals. It's machining pieces at tight tolerances and movement measured in the smallest fractions.

If this is what he does for fun, I wonder what he does for work?

Re: Radio Amateur Copies Signal from Mars-Orbiting Satellite

#8

Post by myth2018 »

geocrasher wrote: post #7

This is nothing short of incredible. Radio is hard, even at HF (1-30mhz). It's very forgiving at HF though, and so is very approachable. This is where I spend my ham radio time dabbling and hacking away at things. VHF is harder, and UHF an order of magnitude harder. But 8-12Ghz? That's not for mere mortals. It's machining pieces at tight tolerances and movement measured in the smallest fractions. If this is what he d…

I have no hands-on experience with homemade equipment for the GHz bands, but I've read that they are a bit less challenging than it seems at a first glance. Mostly because of the availability of GPS receivers providing highly stable, relatively cheap frequency references for transverters.

Notice that I'm not saying this to demerit any achievement. My intention here is to be encouraging in case you intend to give it a try. A similar setup could allow you to operate moon bounce (CW and FT8 seems to be pretty active) and also work the Es'hail-2 geostationary satellite in case you're in range. So it's definitely a very promising field to invest in.

Re: Radio Amateur Copies Signal from Mars-Orbiting Satellite

#9

Post by schoen »

zokier wrote: post #5

> He uses a homemade 60-centimeter dish that seems surprisingly small. overall, impressive feat. would be interesting to know more about the gear. from the posted video, I guess he is using ettus b200, but thats just a guess.

Apparently the Deep Space Network dishes are (now up to) 34 meters:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-deep-space-network-w...

I guess they achieve higher reliability than amateurs on a number of counts, but that contrast also makes the amateur efforts seem even more impressive. (Since area is proportional to the square of diameter, the DSN dishes would each be over 3,000 times larger than Scott Tilley's dish.)

Re: Radio Amateur Copies Signal from Mars-Orbiting Satellite

#10

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

geocrasher wrote: post #7

This is nothing short of incredible. Radio is hard, even at HF (1-30mhz). It's very forgiving at HF though, and so is very approachable. This is where I spend my ham radio time dabbling and hacking away at things. VHF is harder, and UHF an order of magnitude harder. But 8-12Ghz? That's not for mere mortals. It's machining pieces at tight tolerances and movement measured in the smallest fractions. If this is what he d…

> He uses a homemade 60-centimeter dish and relies on software-defined radios (SDRs) to accomplish the task.

apropos I hope

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