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Comment by l00sed | Hacker News Reader

I've reached some geostationary and orbiting weather satellites with Software-Defined Radio (SDR) in the past. I'd love to try and snag some signals from these... Anyone know of a more formal scientific write-up on these to find the frequency/modulation?

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The FCC filings are probably your best bet, 95% of the technical details we know are from them (92% of statistics are made up). I'm not sure if they contain enough information for you though.

There are links here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/wiki/index#wiki_-_what_fre...

From what sparse info I can find, it appears ground > sat > ground comms will be encrypted in some fashion so listening with an SDR and doing anything meaningful with the data might be hard, but I'm curious if there will be opportunities for it to be abused for anonymous downlink connections like the Turla spyware group used to do (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/09/how-h...)

A RTL-SDR with whatever antenna you whipped up to listen to NOAA sats is not going to have enough link margin to tune in a SpaceX transmission. IIRC the example user terminal SpaceX demoed ages ago is a phased array hooked up to a fairly beefy modem.

https://fcc.report/IBFS/SAT-LOA-20161115-00118/1158350

The frequency bands and modulation types are available from the FCC.

The data will probably be encrypted, but I think theres a good chance you might be able to get some metadata.

It seems that all the frequencies are 10GHz+ which is way past the range of most readily-available SDR dongles... Probably not feasible ATM.

You can semi-easily get transverters for those frequencies.

Also 10 GHz is possible with some knowledge and effort. See the hams on Youtube reaching QO-100.

All that matters is the bandwidth. You could mix it down to a lower frequency.

I have an SDR module and have played around listening to things (and having a blast doing it) but nothing like that! That sounds really cool. Do you have any resources you could point?

It's really incredible what the consumer RTL-SDR can do for the price. I watched this user's video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjClTnZ4Xh4&vl=en) and went down the rabbithole. Made my own dipole for an art exhibit: https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/signs-of-life

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