Did you know that Fox-1Cliff and Fox-1D will be using different camera image resolutions?
While they both have the same model imager and camera system design, the Virginia Tech students decided that they wanted to try a smaller resolution with their camera because of the need to take two quick successive images in order to get the full 640×480 image. This can cause a “distortion” if the subject of the image is moving, as we saw in Fox-1Cliff EM testing.
Dave Swanson, KG5CCI reported that on February 10th, at 2009UTC he made a scheduled contact with Eduardo Erlemann, PY2RN, using AO-7 Mode B, from Shinnal Mountain just west of Little Rock, Arkansas. His 10 digit grid locator for the contact was EM34ST20SC, and Eduardo’s station is located at GG66LW77JQ in Vinhedo/SP, Brazil. Using this mapping website for reference, this equates to 8030.895 km which we believe to be a new record for AO-7 Mode B.
From Michelle Thompson via the AMSAT North America Facebook group.
So what happened when I finally got to the lab? Well, we able to obtain an example flow graph, with some controversy between installations, for DVB. Here is a DVB S2 transmitter in GNUradio. After some troubleshooting to get it to work with the X310, we saw an output waveform using the built-in instruments in GNUradio. Here’s the list of blocks availabe in mainstream GNUradio for DVB. Isn’t this great? Note that there is already DVB-S2X, although it has not been completely tested due to the lack of receivers. Wouldn’t it be great if we could help out here? Next, we transmitted a test signal. It looked a bit puny at first, but we found the settings for gain and improved performance a bit. In other advancements, the HackRF team submitted their first pull request in their documentation. Here’s an FM receiver implementation based on Michael Ossmann’s wonderful tutorials about using HackRF and GNUradio at https://greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/
FoxTelem Version 1.03 has been released
This version of FoxTelem uses a new datafile format. While we store our
data on the server in an SQL database, we use a flat file database for FoxTelem. A
flat file format is nearly optimal for a program that mostly adds new data to
the end of a growing list. With that said, we need to be able to load sections of
the data into memory for efficient analysis. The new data file format allows
that. If you have been downloading data from the server for analysis, you will
see that this format is much faster.