Es'hail-2 Ground Station

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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