I recently moved, and while packing up boxes I found my FunCube Pro+ receiver dongle. One of the many Pandemic Positives is that I have a lot of free time on my hands now, so I thought I would see if I could receive amateur satellites with this. Perusing the AMSAT live Oscar satellite status page, the only recently-launched CubeSat I could receive with the FunCube Pro+ dongle is AO-95, also known as Fox-1Cliff. And even then, the satellite appeared to be in Safe mode, with its transponder not working due to a failed receiver.

Fox-1Cliff is named for Cliff Buttschardt K7RR, who was the amateur radio mentor for the PolySat project at Cal Poly. He was also heavily involved ...

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SatNOGs Station Construction and LNA Power Modifications

In September 2018 I built a remote receiving station for the SatNOGs project. This post describes the build process, and modifications I made to allow for coax power of a Mini-circuits ZX60-33LN-S+ low-noise amplifier.

SatNOGs is a distributed ground station network for amateur radio and university satellites. The idea is to spread a bunch of software-defined receivers around the world to help satellite operators downlink more data from their satellites. The open-source project, running on your local hardware, controls a software-defined receiver, moves directional antennas if you have them, and uploads the audio files and decoded data to a big database. Satellite operators, and other curious people, can see almost-real-time telemetry from the satellites.

As a historical aside, the concept ...

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