Amateur Radio Astronomy Lecture

Joint online lecture on Amateur Radio Astronomy given to the Blackburn Leisure Astronomy Society (BLAS) and the Pretoria Centre of the Astronomy Society of South Africa via Microsoft Teams.

Itty Bitty Radio Telescope and AO100 downlink

How to make a "Itty Bitty Radio Telescope" from a satellite dish and LNB using SV1AFN's AD8313 power detector module to measure the signal in dBm and convert it into a voltage that can be digitised using an Adafruit ADC for the Raspberry Pi - using the design from F5VLB.

Nothing goes to waste as we can use the same dish and LNB to receive amateur radio signals from the Qatar-OSCAR 100 Narrow band transponder onboard the Es'hail-2 geostationary satellite with an RTL-SDR dongle, alternatively we could use the RTL Dongle as part of our Itty Bitty Radio Telescope and measure the power using a GNU Radio block on the Raspberry Pi.

See my post from 15th March!

Australia on 2 Watts

Extremely happy - Running WSPR on a Raspberry Pi 4 driving an FT-817 with Yaesu  SCU-17 sound card interface, I have been heard in Australia! (Anyone else getting spurious decodes with a similar setup ?)

The  antenna is a MALDOL 40 metre band mobile whip mounted on a clothes dryer spike and a "Clansman" PRC counterpoise...

Although I reported 5 Watts (37 dBm) in the transmission, the AGC was backed off and I have since measured the output power with an RMS meter at just under 2 Watts.  I think it's time to build the QRP Labs Ultimate WSPR/QRSS kit or even a Raspberry Pi transmitter!

FT-8 using Clansman EVHF antenna on 17m

With the good conditions on HF, I tried using FT-8 on 17 metres using a Clansman EVHF sleeve dipole.  Despite several attempts to contact stations in the Caribbean, no contacts so far, some experimentation with the FT-817 and WSJT-X settings is required to get some RF out of the antenna...

The olive-green antenna is almost invisible as our neighbour had walked past it several times over the week and not noticed it!  The combination of the lockdown heatwave and guinea pigs hasn't been good to the lawn...

Using the Dwingeloo WebSDR for GRAVES Meteor Scatter

If you are thinking of setting up a meteor scatter receiver using the GRAVES radar, did you know you can use thc Dwingeloo WebSDR in The Netherlands?

Visit http://websdr.camras.nl:8901/ and then select the GRAVES option!

Es'Hail QO 100 WebSDR for the Raspberry Pi

Not bad for a morning's work, setting up a WebSDR for the Es'Hail QO-100 transponder on a Raspberry Pi 3.  Just need a dish, LNB and bias tee.

The software can be downloaded from https://github.com/dj0abr/QO-100_SSB-WebSDR_DATV-WebSpectrum following the YouTube video from DJ0ABR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyf5-YOdivU