{"id":2733,"date":"2015-06-23T09:01:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T23:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/back-with-the-sats-catching-cubes-with-a-dongle\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T13:51:49","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T03:51:49","slug":"back-with-the-sats-catching-cubes-with-a-dongle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2015\/06\/23\/back-with-the-sats-catching-cubes-with-a-dongle\/","title":{"rendered":"Back with the Sats: Catching Cubes with a Dongle"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I’ve been playing around with a little $13 DVB-T SDR Dongle receiver<\/a>. These devices normally tune 24 MHz to 1.7 GHz, but I modified the first one<\/a> I had so that it would tune the HF bands. Pete then sent me another one, which I vowed to keep unmodified, thinking that it would be fun to use it to listen to the many small Cube-Sats that are up there. Most have downlinks (and Morse Code beacons) in the 470 MHz range. I whipped together a simple ground-plane antenna<\/a> for this band (One 6 inch copper wire as the receive element with 4 five inch groundplane elements). <\/strong>
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I then went to the “Heavens Above” website<\/a>, plugged in my location, and clicked on “Amateur satellites.” This gave me a very accurate schedule of satellite passes. I started listening. <\/strong>
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