Discone antenna for a station kickstart?

SatNOGS
1

I already own a pair of discone atennas and the hardware to make then work with a rtlsdr dongle, would this be ok to start a station?

2

Hey @kristianpaul0 ! You can certainly try and report the results of it… But keep in mind that discone antennas tend to have reception lobes towards the horizon. If they are operating OK around 137Mhz, then it will be probably OK for NOAA satellites, so you can start with that.

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3

Getting for now a small omnidirectional antenna that works at 137 Mhz… btw that kind of antenna is not in the list

4

First attempt, antenna is not optional just learning how to operate the client for now…

https://network-dev.satnogs.org/observations/13804/#tab-audio

5

Hope it goes well. Interested to see what kind of results you get with a discone

6

So far

https://network-dev.satnogs.org/observations/26115/
https://network-dev.satnogs.org/observations/26117/
https://network-dev.satnogs.org/observations/26110/
https://network-dev.satnogs.org/observations/26084/

Quite noise, waiting for a LNA on the next month i hope…

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7

Looks a bit noisey but you’re getting some results in there. Do you think you’ll stick with the discone?

8

I’m waiting for an LNA, but that the only antenna I have for now

9

I found that the lna gave me too much noise (lna4all) and so I run my station without one at the moment. Some thought on shielding would probably help

10

What does you shielding setup looks like?

11

How much feedline between the antenna, LNA, and SDR?

12

It was all a bit close. RTL to lna was sma adapter lna to ant was around 10cm of rg174. I put it down to being too close to the RPi really. Assumed the feeder was helping to pick up noise from the RPi

13

yeah… might be too much…

I’ve got 100ft of LMR-400 between my LNA and RPi so there’s a big need to push more. :slight_smile:

14

You aren’t wrong. The longest length I have is the USB to RTL and I think I ended up with 5m. All indoors.