Amateur Satellites

168 readers

1 users here now

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

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

thomasdouwes

[email protected]

Meteor-M 2-3 is spinning (i3b.co)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/amateursatellites

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Not another one

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Aha. I thought this was a one-person community based on the first few posts so I stopped checking usernames. Sorry.

Wow, the IR does make the flyover scan technique surprisingly neat. Too bad there is no emergency shutter for when the sensor is about to point at the sun (but that would be another potential point of failure).

I am confused why they don't just turn the analogue transmission off to save power or direct more of it to the digital transmitter. The digital data are already received by NOAA’s various receivers and shared with meteorologists online, right? The amateur radio community would complain but they have been unsuccessful in preventing other analog shutdowns.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Usually they just don't start spinning, some of the NOAA ones have been going for 25 years and haven't ever lost orientation.
The satellite in this post is a russian one, they don't have an analog transmission anymore, this image is from digital transmission near the frequency of the NOAA analog one, so still easy enough to recieve.
But as for the analog NOAA transmission, There really isn't any reason to shut down the analog transmission, the satellite was built with enough power to run it, so shutting it down would just lead to a surpus of power on satellite. I don't think the design would even allow pushing more power on the digital signal.
NOAA will have some huge tracked dishes for this to get a perfect image even with the lowish power level.
Also, the satellites with analog are not the main ones anymore. NOAA has some new satellites with much higher resolution imagery that are not nearly as easy to receive as these older ones. they only broadcast at 8GHz instead of the 1.7GHz or 137MHz that the current ones do