Carl Reade

Good stuff. You should be able to get false colour in the settings as well.

Not bad at all. You will get passes like that and others will be a lot better.

Basically these satellites orbit constantly transmitting live weather pictures. So the aim is to wait for it to pass overhead, tune to it's frequency, decode the signal using software and produce a picture.

Just a horizontal V and LNA. I used WXtrack software to look at the passes.

Software is fine. To improve a quad helix or turnstile would help both not easy to build. Overall I found I generally I got one decent quality pass a day. Here are my decent ones.

I was referring to your first post On the weather one the best results I've had was using a horizontal V antenna and a LNA4ALL preamp and a decent pass helps a lot.

Looks way too narrow for station. Check if noise level changes when aerial connected. Would also widen the band to the max.

Nice webpage and concept. Just a couple of questions, points, The user is going to need the co ords of the telescope to know when and what it will drift through. Is the scope going to be Alt Az mounted in order to look at different locations of sky? Maybe an idea to point users to software ie Stellarium in order to plan a scan request. I take it you will be carrying out requests manually? Carl

Glad to see your getting results. I don't think the line amp would be any advantage with only 3m of coax. Yes pointing is important, depending where you point and arms in that direction. The above graph was a drift scan of Cassiopeia. If your getting a big jump and small bump it's safe to say Cygnus area has passed through the scope. I use the off method for all the graphs that brings out the details and should give you results. To seperate different objects would be difficult as the resolution of the small scope simply is not good enough and there is a lot of hydrogen up there. Maybe using other frequencies than hydrogen would be useful to do this. I have still to put the total power bit of the scope together to see if it works or not.

Yea PI needs to be shielded or away from the rest of electronics. Not sure if the LNA is water proof so I boxed mine and sealed all the connectors.

Is the PI on?

You want to be doing two things. All of your RF chain should be shielded in metal enclosures. There's not much point in having shielded coax with the line amp open to RFI. So in the RF chain it's to keep RFI out. That would leave RFI only getting in from the antenna and where filters come in. With the PI your trying to keep its RFI in an enclosed area so it's not interfering with anything else. Bit like a microwave oven. So doing both greatly reduces the PI and external sources interfering with the signal your after. However another issue is cabling which can carry RFI so cables ie USB should also have a ferrite core on as well. Computers simply are not screened for RF. Amplifiers are dumb if they see it in their range they will amplify it, hence the use of filters.

A metal box would be ideal. You could line the box in foil and attach the RF ground to it and also foil up the pi seperate, ideally the pi would be best away from the RF amps. Be a matter of testing.

I think you will need to move the PI away from the rest. Not sure what's going on with the line amp and filter perhaps a power issue when they are in the chain. Could it be that the LNA isn't getting power when they are connected? I prefer the satellite inline amps as they and the LNA are just fed off the coax. Keep posting your results.

LNAs always work better cool. It's more RF interference from the PI I was thinking of.