Satellite Monitoring in a Turbulent World? 23
Arimathea asks: "I've spent the past week searching for information on the Web on how to do utility monitoring of satellites - i'm primarily interested in viewing unedited feeds from major news networks, but I'd also be quite curious to learn about monitoring of government, military, and NASA satellites for voice, data, and video. This information is scattered all over the place. Can anyone provide an introduction on this, pointers to good books, web sites, or equipment providers?"
Uh oh.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Uh oh.. (Score:3, Funny)
Encrypted? (Score:1)
NASA TV (Score:4, Informative)
Shortwave Radio Hobbiests (Score:2, Informative)
Samus is correct, most commercial and military communications will be encrypted. I would also add that there are enough stories to show that trying to decrypt this stuff without showing some discretion has gotten some people into hot water with the government.
A decent program for monitoring satellites is Starry
Corrections (Score:5, Informative)
While "shortwave" includes the ham bands, "shortwave hobbiests" are unlicensed listeners and most of the time focus on the shortwave broadcasters. Hams are licensed to transmit on a number of allocated bands, at power levels up to 1.5 kilowatts with no ERP limits in most cases. (i.e. you can have as much antenna gain as you want.)
Amateur operation isn't limited to HF. (The world below 30 MHz) Hams operate on VHF, UHF, and even microwave. (10 GHz and 24 GHz are popular thanks to the abundance of surplus Gunn diode sources at those bands - Supermarket motion detectors can be retuned to the amateur bands and made into a transmitter.)
There are quite a few amateur-operated satellites. http://www.amsat.org/ is a great resource for these units. (Almost all are registered with AMSAT.) "shortwave" has nothing do do with these sats, almost NONE of them operate in the HF bands. (A small handful have downlinks on 28 MHz, none have HF uplinks because the ionosphere woudl block the signal.) The most common bands used by ham sats are 2 meters (144-148 MHz) and 70 centimeters (440 MHz), although they go up to the microwave region. AO-40 (aka Phase IIID) was slated to run on 6-7 different bands, including a band adjacent to the 2.4 GHz ISM band. Unfortunately only 2-3 transponders are operational - During assembly, someone screwed up and connected the fuel lines to the orbit adjustment engine wrong and it exploded when they tried to execute their first engine burn. It's amazing how much of that sat they've been able to get operational despite the explosion.
Government and communications sats? I don't think so. These are all going to be encrypted. The exception are some scientific satellites, which have data downlinks in the clear. (Best example of this are the NOAA orbiters - Yes, you can receive weather satellite data at home, both from polar orbiters and the geostationary NOAA sats. I believe the non-weather earth-imaging Landsats use the same modulation scheme as the NOAA orbiters.)
Re:Corrections (Score:1)
Not being a ham myself, I couldn't have come up with all the proper details. You delivered much better information than I could have dug up.
Sure! (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks in Advance,
Jack Bauer, CTU
Several Sources (Score:5, Informative)
Usenet newsgroups: alt.video.satellite.mpeg-dvb, rec.video.satellite.tvro
Google keywords: satellite wild feeds [google.com]
Note that these sources are useful no matter where in the world you are; they're not U.S. specific.
Have fun.
The Internet (Score:2)
No you didnt... (Score:1)
-M-
long live the new flesh! (Score:1)
Great, weird movie directed by David Cronenberg. This guy runs a little TV station. He tunes in to some unauthorized satellite feeds, and encounters the terrible Videodrome [imdb.com] !
Not everything is encrypted/secret (Score:2)
Not many... (Score:2)
I have an analog BUD that can hit both horizons. The problem I've found, is that not a lot of signals are being broadcast Clear To Air anymore. Except for breaking news or sporting events being broadcast to a host of affiliates, almost everything is getting encrypted.
And unfortunately, a lot of the CTA signals that are still around are moving to digital. Unfortunately I can't justify the cost of upgra
Good Start (Score:3, Informative)