Hillbilly Tracking of Low Earth Orbit Satellites | Hacker News Reader

Hillbilly Tracking of Low Earth Orbit Satellites

travisgoodspeed.blogspot.com

280 pointswmat33 comments

If you're interested in starting to play with Satellites: Install MacDoppler and track SO-50. Then get a cheapie VHF/UHF dual band radio that can tune to 436.800 Mhz. You don't need a big antenna, just figure out where the satellite is from Azimuth and Elevation and point the radio's antenna at the ground so that it's upside down and perpendicular to a line from you to the satellite (like you're shooting a snake with a ray gun if the antenna is the ray gun). Tune up a few Khz as the satellite is coming towards you and down as it is going away from you to compensate for doppler. You'll hear lots of hams using the satellite as a repeater.

If you want to talk too, get a Technician ham license which is very easy and an Arrow II dual band antenna and point it at the bird and chat away. [And then call me, I'm callsign AD0ER]

There are over 50 amateur satellites that were launched as repeaters, most of them dead. FO-29, SO-50, AO-07 and a handful of others work. I believe Turksat-3USAT should enable any day now as a repeater. There's also the ISS. You can also get telemetry from many other satellites and it's all mostly just VHF and UHF.

The author of the project should turn the project into a kickstarter to provide hams with auto-tracking of satellites. I wouldn't even care about radio integration, just save me having to stand outside with a hand-held yagi looking like I should be wearing a tinfoil hat. Post something to QRZ.com and see if there's interest.

Speaking of cheap 2m/70cm HTs, I got into ham radio recently due to the Baofeng UV-5r being $32 on Amazon; got tech/general last week (KG7EPM). http://www.amazon.com/BaoFeng-UV-5R-136-174-400-480-Dual-Ban...

Wow, the equivalent Yaesu is over $180 bucks. Thanks for the tip. I'm occasionally on 20 meters around 8 to 9pm mountain time around 14.250 +- 20khz in case you play with HF. Congrats on General!

Travis Goodspeed makes lots of hardware gadgets [1], he also gave a really cool talk about "Writing a Thumbdrive from Scratch" (for antiforensics) [2] at the 29th Chaos Communication Congress [29c3].

[1] http://goodfet.sourceforge.net/

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Im0_KUEf8

[2] in above was a very impressive talk. Mr. Goodspeed appears quite comfortable on stage, although I think his 'antiforensics' was somewhat less interesting than the notion of exploiting the fact that so many USB drivers exist and that flashing device firmware isn't super difficult. Probably a ton of exploits are possible by building device firmwares that behave unexpectedly and have not so robust drivers in the OS. Dropping a stack of malicious thumbdrives with not just evil.exe on them, but actual evil firmware is an interesting concept.

I've been having a lot of fun with the RTLSDR... Best $14 dollars I ever spent several times! The Reddit community is pretty good http://reddit.com/r/rtlsdr and you'll find links to the original project and more in their info section.

Travis's talk at Summercon was incredible - I shot the video for it and will hopefully (with Travis's and Mark's permission, of course) will post it soon!

This project is incredible!

What was the talk on? This is the first I've heard of Travis.

This is the first you have heard of Mr. Goodspeed?[1]

I scoff at you, sir.

[1] See http://goodfet.sourceforge.net/ for one famous project of his

It was on this exact blog post. But just to hear him tell the story of how he built this thing in his words was incredible.

"Portscanning Low Earth Orbit" http://www.summercon.org/presentations.html#orbit, lots of overlap with this post, but we also learned how to pronounce appalachian.

From the same people who invented hidden compartments in cars for running shine, we have further proof that hillbillies are ingenious. Well done, sir!

Travis Goodspeed isn't your average hillbilly. You should have a look at some of the other stuff on his blog.

Excellent project but fails the high tech redneck "hillbilly tracking" title due to lack of duct tape, no bonfire, no empty beer cans as structural material, no camo spray paint decoration, didn't see it up on concrete blocks, no stick welding with slag everywhere, and no baling wire. Still an excellent project, just not "hillbilly" as per the title; would have been done identically in downtown Manhattan or at my lab in the frozen north.

Hillbilly is a person that lives in the mountains and not a person that jury rigs things, per se.

I would respectfully disagree and provide the counterexamples of my rural friends and family in Wisconsin where the tallest mountain in the state is about 500 feet, and on the other side as a counterexample I present "Colorado" and "Hawaii"

> didn't see it up on concrete blocks

Take a look at the annotation on http://www.flickr.com/photos/travisgoodspeed/8581912859/in/p...

Bootleggers may have had hidden compartments but from what I learned going to school in North Carolina is that they just drove really fast to evade police (beginning of NASCAR). Being from there I am bias to hillbillies being ingenious. I have seen incredible innovation from some mountain folk.

That's very impressive. Great job building that, I totally want one now. I'm curious as to how you identify the different Satellites? is there an API available that gives the orbits/names?

I believe he fetches a satellite catalogue from Celestrak: http://celestrak.com/

I want to find a source of these dishes.

Here's the Furuno USA page, you can click on Find a Dealer from there.

http://bit.ly/162VzYr

I wouldn't call this "Hillbilly Tracking", since it's the roughly same process many amateur radio and astronomy enthusiasts have been using to track satellites and other objects. But it is a cool build and hack...

Named for its location, Appalachia, not its methodology.

Really fantastic hack. I love the fact you can interact with a piece of real-life hardware (and move it, too) from anywhere in the world with your phone, that adds a sort of emotional-rather-than-logical magic to it :)

As long as all safety and security measures have been taken.. I would hate to see that broken by some script kiddie.

I noticed the mention of Voyager 1 and 2 probes. Are you telling me that dish can receive ( useful data ) signals from the probes themselves ?!

I noticed the same thing. I've read a little about the Voyager probes (what geek hasn't?) and from my recollection they have to schedule time on some HUGE radiotelescope array in order to communicate with the Voyagers. But I have been known to misrecollect...

Seeing him tracking satellites made me think of the potential for servo-controlled directional antennas with common Wi-Fi. Anyone built a tracking antenna mount using servos? Seems like you would be able to 3D print one that could point my 400 gram Ubiquiti Nanostation device towards various peers to make a mesh network of difficult to jam directional links.

Servocity has fairly inexpensive R/C servo-driven pan/tilt mechanisms.

An N900 <sigh> What a shame Nokia couldn't continue that legacy.. I just can't seem to find the desire to move on from mine..

:'(

Mine is dead. I miss it.

Now this is a very decent hack. I always hope to see more of them. Kudos !

Reply on news.ycombinator.com