Over the last few months, we’ve been in touch with Meharban Singh, RF Engineer at SpaceX, about Signal Tide. Meharban has been giving us some practical help in trying to get reliable signals from the LES-1 satellite.
We are currently in Los Angeles, where we met up with Meharban, and also with Jeremy Fields, Paul Weiss, Devin Williams, and Han Lin (Mission and Launch Operations Engineer, Ground Segment Engineer, RF/Antenna Engineer, and RF Engineer, respectively, all at SpaceX). After talking through our ideas with them, we hatched a plan to head out from the city to try to monitor a pass of the satellite. This was based on the presumption that, if we’re trying to get a weak signal, then we’re more likely to get it if we’re outside of the radio interference of all the signals zipping around in the air in Los Angeles.
Also, the passes of the satellite happen fairly early in the morning at the moment, so any attempt to monitor them would need an early start. So we set our alarm clocks and dragged ourselves out of bed for a 5am start. The way out there was along the Pacific Coast Highway — an amazing place to watch the sun rise (but tricky to take any photos of when you’re driving fast).
And so it was that we found ourselves, together with Meharban, Jeremy, and Devin, half-way up a hillside in Malibu at just after 7am in the morning, trying to get parts connected together in time.
It looked like this.
We expected our satellite to rise at 7:21am at 284° (west-northwest) and set at 8am at 132° (south-east).
On a suggestion from Jeremy, we downloaded an app, GoSatWatch, which allows real-time tracking of the paths of 200 major satellites, and which can be customised to add other satellites via a TLE. So this is why we’re waving our phones around in the photos below.
This run was mainly to test out our setup and try to figure out if it would be possible to get some usable data, either this time around or for the next run. We were using an omnidirectional antenna, along with an Ettus USRP and Gnuradio.
We’ll have more passes coming up over the next few days, and hopefully we’ll get closer to having some usable results. More soon!
