Es'hail-2 Ground Station

The BATC WebSDR & Spectrum Monitor are located at the icon Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall (IO70JB).

The equipment is housed in a room dedicated to amateur radio infrastructure in what was the control room for the now defunct GHY2 90 ft dish antennae which was 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 heavy winds during October 2018.

This was replaced in January 2019 with a heavy duty Hirschmann 1.3mt offset dish.

RF Front End

A modified Octagon quad LNB is mounted on the dish and locked to 25MHz output from a LeoBodnar GPSDO.

See https://wiki.batc.org.uk/Es%27hail-2_LNBs_and_Antennaes for more details on the locking modifications

2 coaxes are used to feed separate horizontal & vertical feeds in 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

A separate AirSpy USB SDR Receiver, locked to a 10MHz output from the LeoBodnar GPSDO, is used for the WebSDR and Spectrum monitor..

GPS reference

The GPS reference is a Leo Bodnar unit 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 MoDNY, 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