RF/Ham radio thread

[SSDeveloper]

A thread for people to nerd out about whatever radio stuff anyone wants to talk about.

I'm guessing it'll be mostly amateur radio operators here, but anyone who wants to talk anything radio is welcome!

Rules:

• All the normal forum rules of course
• Try to keep it generally on the topic of radio/RF stuff (related to KSA or not), little tangents here and there are fine, but if it gets too long I'd encourage you to make a new thread for it (or bring it to DMs)

 

[Rass]

It would be fun if the shape, orientation, and size of the craft had an effect on detecting it in deep space.

 

[Terra Incognita]

Cool thread - I look forward to checking in!

The RF mod by @General Meatsauce has me imagining all sorts of fun gameplay and mods that could be made.

 

[Hebdomad]

Here's an RF thought I had rattling around my head.

So Ham radio enthusiasts use HF and lower frequencies because you can bounce it off the ionosphere and get around the world propagation.

But what if you used HF or even VLF radio in space? Communicating with Earth is going to be a problem yes, but what if you wanted to hide.. er.. I mean not cause interference radio signals from Earth or other satellites? It wouldn't be too hard to make a long dipole by spinning up a satellite and spooling out some wire with weights on the end.

 

[Spaceman3d]

It would be fun if the shape, orientation, and size of the craft had an effect on detecting it in deep space.

Shealth Ships let's goooo!!!! But the main way of detection will be heat emission so no stealth in space

 

[Spaceman3d]

I'm not into HAM radio myself but watched some videos on YT, just interested in this stuff. also Comuication kinda important in spaceflight

 

[Hebdomad]

I'm not into HAM radio myself but watched some videos on YT, just interested in this stuff. also Comuication kinda important in spaceflight

You can get yourself an Software Defined Radio (SDR) radio for cheap. Even listen to ones connected to the internet. That's how I fell into the hobby. 'Save it for Parts' on youtube has excellent videos on how to pick up and decode satellite communications with a simple USB SDR.

 

[SSDeveloper]

[...] Even listen to ones connected to the internet. [...]

@Spaceman3d You can find some at http://websdr.org/ (there's probably other websites, but this is the main one).
You can go to the lower 7.xxx MHz frequencies and hear some hams from around the world (some in voice, some in Morse code, and, if you listen at the right time, even some SSTV!), the mode you'll want is LSB (Lower Side Band). There's also lots of other stuff on there you can try, but that's one I'm more confident will work with WebSDR (which I've not used too much myself).
Once upon a time there was NOAA weather satellites you could hear with these (with a very distinctive "tick-tock" sound), but those got decommissioned a few months ago :/

 

[General Meatsauce]

You can hear SSTV on 14.200 mhz almost at any time. There's a free app you can use to decode. I added RTTY to the RF Mod so when we get MP, we can QSO