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Comment by dvdplm | Hacker News Reader

This looks neat, but for a total GNURadion/Satellite telemetry n00b, is there a birds-eyes overview on this stuff you recommend?

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For gnu radio or for satellites?

There are lots of web tutorials for SDR using gnu radio, I really like the one Mike Ossman does on the Great Scott Gadgets site[1]. My evolution was one of the cheap digital TV dongles, then a HackRF-1, and at some point next a LimeSDR.

Once you get the SDR side of things under your belt you can start picking specific radio sources to investigate whether it is sun spots, satellites, or something more mundane like the controls for R/C cars, garage doors, or wireless lights.

[1] http://greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/

SDR and GNURadio, seems like the best first step! Thanks!

I just bought a RTL-SDR dongle and installed GNURadio about a week ago. So far I've gotten a basic FM (broadcast radio) receiver going, and am starting to port that over to narrow-band FM (so I can use it with my ham radio) and am looking at how to integrate a DTMF decoder. It's really fun stuff, and not very expensive to get started with the low end SDR hardware. I think my device cost me about $25.00 (USD) from a vendor on Amazon.

I haven't gotten as far as doing any of the satellite stuff yet, but that's on the list for "real soon now".

If you're thinking about taking the plunge, I'd definitely encourage you to do it.

Here is a technical overview of the Software radio approach to satcom.

http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/679473/20514128/134930...

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