this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Amateur Satellites

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Discussion about amateur reception and processing of data from artificial satellites, primarily through radio signals but data from internet resources is welcome too.

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Captured with RTL-SDRv3 and V-Dipole.
Processed in SatDump (Android).

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[โ€“] ThankYou 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

There's so much more you can do with SDRs. Just search for "things to do with SDR".
First of all, RTL-SDR is originally just a DVB-T TV dongle, but someone found it can send raw I/Q data in debug mode. Thus first inexpensive SDR entered the world. 24MHz-1,766MHz (in case of R820T2 tuner) for just around 5$.
Check this about page: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/about-rtl-sdr/
It also lists some things you can do with SDR.
However, make sure to pay attention to signal bandwidth. RTL-SDR can only go up to 2.4MHz in bandwidth (stably). That is however fine most of the time.

If you can get the generic TV dongle so cheaply, why get RTL-SDRv3? It's been improved for use as SDR. Improvements are listed in the datasheet here: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/RTL-SDR-Blog-V3-Datasheet.pdf starting on second page.

Want to try listening with SDR right now (for free)? Yes, you can: http://websdr.org/ . Select some SDR based on location/frequency range and try listening to what's there.
One note, Chrome browser introduced some bug with audio a long time ago. That's why you'll see the "Start audio" button on some pages. If you don't see it and you can't hear anything, try Firefox if you aren't using it already.