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Hillbilly Tracking of Low Earth Orbit

Repurposing an Inmarsat Dish

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Video duration
00:47:02
Language
English
Abstract
Satellites in Low Earth Orbit have tons of nifty signals, but they move quickly though the sky and are difficult to track with fine accuracy. This lecture describes a remotely operable satellite tracking system that the author built from a Navy-surplus Inmarsat dish in Southern Appalachia.

Satellites in Low Earth Orbit have tons of nifty signals, but they move quickly though the sky and are difficult to track with fine accuracy. This lecture describes a remotely operable satellite tracking system that the author built from a Navy-surplus Inmarsat dish in Southern Appalachia.

The entire system is controlled through a Postgres database, fed by various daemons spread across multiple machines. So when I click on a satellite on my laptop or cellphone, it runs "UPDATE target SET name='Voyager 1';" and the motor daemon then begins to track the new target while the prediction daemon maintains accurate estimates of its position in the sky. Additional daemons take spectral prints or software-defined radio recordings of the targeted object for later review.

Talk ID
5463
Event:
30C3
Day
2
Room
Saal 1
Start
2 p.m.
Duration
01:00:00
Track
Science & Engineering
Type of
lecture
Speaker
Travis Goodspeed
Talk Slug & media link
30C3_-_5463_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312281400_-_hillbilly_tracking_of_low_earth_orbit_-_travis_goodspeed

Talk & Speaker speed statistics

Very rough underestimation:
143.9 wpm
790.1 spm
146.2 wpm
805.5 spm
100.0% Checking done100.0%
0.0% Syncing done0.0%
0.0% Transcribing done0.0%
0.0% Nothing done yet0.0%
  

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Talk & Speaker speed statistics with word clouds

Whole talk:
143.9 wpm
790.1 spm
Travis Goodspeed:
146.2 wpm
805.5 spm