Greetings,
Just thought I’d share some work I’ve been doing on a non-rotator station. Thanks to cshields we started by building a couple 70cm paralindy type antennas discussed around here, light testing has shown those to work ok. I went onwards and built a proper 2m Lindenblad as well based on the AMSat article and some thingiverse parts I found:
Finally this weekend I was able to get things assembled into a testable config:
Antennas
Enclosure & guts
I was also able to feed two separate SDR’s off this pair of antennas. I know others have done some clever things with feeding multiple satnogs clients off a single SDR. I’m not that clever yet, just figured I’d try out splitting the LNA output to multiple SDRs. I’ve been hunting down wide-band power dividers on Ebay to use for the antenna feed combiners as well as splitting the post-LNA signal to multiple SDRs. I’m using this LNA which others have had success with.
I was able to get a successful decode of Bugsat-1 on this setup indoors with a single client hooked up as it passed within view of the windows.
Next I hooked up the second client and SDR. It seems to have been successful, although the pass was not in a good enough orientation of the windows to get a decode this time (scheduled an observation on both stations):
Station 1: [https://network.satnogs.org/observations/437603/]
Station 2: [https://network.satnogs.org/observations/437604/]
While not a great observation, it at least proved I could get the signal on both SDRs. I intend to hook up a third RPi/SDR in this enclosure by the time I get this ready to deploy outdoors. Hopefully after this super cold weather passes I can get it outdoors for more testing.
I’m open to suggestions on this setup, just wanted to share what I’ve done so far.
Thanks.