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Image of Earth appearing from behind the moon from DSLWP-B

Image of Earth appearing from behind the moon from DSLWP-B

Point at the moon!!

Point at the moon!!

Now this is exciting. (hint: enable VHF/UHF/Microwave features on the settings page)

Back on the air after 13 years!

Back on the air after 13 years!

Who knew. Ft8 dragged me back out of listening mode. Always been a digital fan, rtty was a favourite back in the day. Been dragging all sorts of bits of aluminium from the pile behind the hut to see what’s still usable. There’s a minibeam that used to work well ‘in the old days’ (2005 if my online log is up to date) but the tower has long gone. Anyway, 21 countries worked on 14 in a weekend with 20w to a mobile whip and counterpoise at 2 meters high, what’s not to like? Logs automatically updated at eQSL and qrz.com if we ‘spoke’, or are about to.

These new fangled LEO sats look interesting, if you hear me, give me a call……

Airspy spyserver testing

Airspy spyserver testing

 

Been following the developments over at Airspy with interest and am eagerly awaiting the arrival of a shiny new Airspy HF+.  They have been developing their spyserver software apace of late and it is now in a good place. This allows remote access to a range of Software Defined Radios across the network using their SDR# software. The server can be run on a range of computing platforms from the humble (pick a fruit) pi all the way up to full blown systems. I’ve had great success repurposing a couple of Orange Pi Pc boards. These can be accessed via SDR# on sdr://noisyno.com:5555/ , currently acheap noisy Rtl-Sdr + spyverter on a Welbrook loop, a place holder for the above mentioned HF+ or sdr://noisyno.com:5554/ ,a cheap Rtl-Sdr on a deaf discone which will be changed at some point to a Satnogs driven clothes drier yagi with an airspy mini to monitor the sats.

A list of current servers with decent hardware can be found on the Airspy web site. There’s also a support group with good info and some other test server urls.

Give it a try…

(Quick update; Simon, G4ELI, over at http://www.sdr-radio.com/ is close to having his excellent console software working with spyserver as I type this)