Difference between revisions of "Es'hail-2 Ground Station"
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The equipment is housed in a room dedicated to amateur radio infrastructure in the original control building for the now defunct GHY2 90 ft dish antennae, built in 1969. | The equipment is housed in a room dedicated to amateur radio infrastructure in the original control building for the now defunct GHY2 90 ft dish antennae, built in 1969. | ||
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As well as the Es'hail-2 (now known as Qatar Oscar 100) WebSDR and spectrum monitor, the amateur radio facility houses an AMSAT-UK Funcube ground station and an HF Kiwi WebSDR. | As well as the Es'hail-2 (now known as Qatar Oscar 100) WebSDR and spectrum monitor, the amateur radio facility houses an AMSAT-UK Funcube ground station and an HF Kiwi WebSDR. | ||
Revision as of 14:49, 15 February 2019
The BATC WebSDR & Spectrum Monitor are located at the iconic Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall (IO70JB).
The equipment is housed in a room dedicated to amateur radio infrastructure in the original control building for the now defunct GHY2 90 ft dish antennae, built in 1969.
As well as the Es'hail-2 (now known as Qatar Oscar 100) WebSDR and spectrum monitor, the amateur radio facility houses an AMSAT-UK Funcube ground station and an HF Kiwi WebSDR.
The Oscar 100 webSDR and spectrum monitor can be accessed at https://eshail.batc.org.uk/
Current Status
The RF hardware was installed at Goonhilly Earth Station in August 2018 and installation was completed in January 2019.
The service was launched on 10th February 2019, 4 days before Oscar 100 was commissioned.
Technical Details
Dish
The original dish installed in August 2018 was a consumer model and suffered damage in strong winds during October 2018.
This was replaced in January 2019 with a heavy duty Hirschmann 1.3m offset dish.
RF Front End
A modified Octagon quad LNB is mounted on the dish and locked to the 25 MHz output from a Leo Bodnar GPSDO.
See https://wiki.batc.org.uk/Es%27hail-2_LNBs_and_Antennaes for more details on the locking modifications
The 25 MHz reference is fed to the LNB through a dedicated coax run, and 2 further coax runs are used to feed separate horizontal & vertical feeds back to the equipment room.
Equipment room
The Qatar Oscar100 equipment shares the dedicated amateur equipment room with an AMSAT-UK Funcube ground station and an HF Kiwi SDR.
Receivers
2 separate AirSpy USB SDR Receivers, locked to a 10MHz output from the LeoBodnar GPSDO, are used for the WebSDR and Spectrum monitor.
GPS reference
The GPS reference is a Leo Bodnar unit, running firmware version 1.12, programmed to produced 10 MHz (for the Airspys) and 25 MHz for the LNB. The settings for the reference to produce these 2 frequencies were not straightforward (as the 2 outputs on the Leo Bodnar unit need to be linked) but are here for reference:
Host PC
The websdr and spectrum monitor are both hosted on a common PC platform, designed and developed by Phil M0DNY, with the following specification.
PC Hardware
i7-2600 CPU
16GB DDR3 RAM
Intel DQ67SW Motherboard
500GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD
750W Corsair TX Power Supply
PC Software
Ubuntu Server 18.04
Nginx Web Server
airspy_tcp fork (source)
narrowband WebSDR by PA3FWM (homepage)
wideband spectrum monitor (source coming soon)
Network
The network connection provided by Goonhilly provides a capability of < 250Mbit/s up and down stream.
The networking infrastructure designed by Phil M0DNY consists of the following:
TBC