American satellite started transmitting again after being abandoned in 1967 | Hacker News Reader

American satellite started transmitting again after being abandoned in 1967

thevintagenews.com

167 pointscsirac233 comments

Here's a recording of what it transmits (just a carrier, probably modulated by voltage fluctuations from the solar panels as it tumbles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxqwZ42NyLw

Interestingly, the article says that the signal was picked up by an amateur in North Cornwall (in the UK?) in 2013, but the video you linked to was posted in 2012 by a ham from Brazil.

>(in the UK?)

Correct. I live near Bude, north Cornwall, UK and can confirm this.

Local attractions include GCHQ Bude[1], TAT-3[2], TAT-14[3], CANTAT-1[4], Apollo[5], TAT-8[6], AC-2[7], EIG[8] and GLO-1[9].

Unrelated but relevant: Henry Bottinger, former AT&T big cheese and author of possibly the finest book I've read on getting your point across to an audience[10], lives a few hundred metres up the road from me. Nice guy, too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCHQ_Bude

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-3

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-14

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANTAT-1

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_(submarine_communicatio...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-8

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC-2_(cable_system)

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIG_(cable_system)

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLO-1_(cable_system)

[10] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moving-Mountains-Letting-Others-Thin...

Did you mean "Henry M. Boettinger"? http://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2011/2/14/AT&T-Arc...

Yes, that's him. We occasionally chat about mundane things at the local store. Alzheimer's disease hasn't been kind, so he needs some friendly help and assistance from time to time.

That's so sad, sorry to hear about that. :(

Still seems strange to see somewhere so close to home mentioned here. Always feels like the middle of nowhere when I'm in the area.

Book ordered. Thanks for the suggestion. Out of print, so a second hand copy off Amazon had to suffice.

Happy to help. There was a period from ~2003-2008 when I was looking for _any_ copy of the book, 'new' copies were absurdly expensive and even the well-used versions were upwards of 40USD. Then I moved to Cornwall, met the guy and he gave me a copy from his stash.

That's a great combination of visualizations, looks kind of like a waterfall.

That's what it's called[1] :)

http://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/889/what-is-a-waterfa...

Cool, I learned something – thank you! :o)

I, for one, am glad they split that article into two pages; I was getting a bit intimidated by the length.

I didn't even notice that it was split into two pages.

I also appreciated that they left out the detail on what the intended purpose for Les 1 and Les 2 was, so they wouldn't confuse anyone with too much information.

http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/les-1.htm

Yes, I often I judge the journalistic source by the links to other articles. Here, I judge that the source is very interested in the word "dirty". That makes a ham radio article all the more .. unexpected.

lol, but then I realized.. maybe it's done on purpose to validate an article's appeal.

It's done on purpose to get more ads to your eyeballs.

Which is silly since the same ads show on both pages. But I guess the site can charge twice...

I also appreciated the fact that they overrode the browser's default scrolling to a less natural speed, and in doing so, also prevented me from being able to use gestures to return to hacker news.

This site uses "smooth scrolling" which tries to mimic how scrolling on macs work and subsequently breaking scrolling on mac.

Scrolls like every other site for me, but if it's broken on Macs, that's nice.

What's extremely infuriating is that I disable smooth scrolling where possible only to get it shoved down my throat by various sites. Which web designer comes to the conclusion that overriding a platform-wide choice is a great idea?

That ranted, on Firefox/Windows it scrolls normally.

I didn't notice it in Safari on OS X (it scrolled fine), but scrolling with Chrome on OS X is terrible.

Scrolls fine for me in Firefox on Mac, that is after I allowed the site on NoScript.

Also the "related content" is pretty much not worksafe.

High quality web-site there plastered with borderline-NSFW social links. Nice.

Another great reason to run an ad blocker. My webpage looked pretty clean, no "social" links.

Ouch; I also run ad blockerd, or I might've tried to find a more reasonable page to post (turns out there's a decent blog post with basically the same information).

I found a blog by Andrew Garrott (M0NRD) describing their experience monitoring the signal, also has a recording.

http://nerdsville.blogspot.com/2013/03/receiving-les1-satell...

Some detail about the Lincoln Experimental Satellites here: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/SP-4217/ch8.htm

http://starringthecomputer.com/snapshots/independence_day_po...

Changeling? Uh oh.

Everyone who worked on that space junk is dead?

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