I'm a software engineer that works with a bunch of electrical engineers
on some radar stuff. So I've been interested in learning more about the
electronics, signal processing and related matters. I'm also interested
in and fairly knowledgeable about orbital things already, so it seems
like amsats are a natural fit.
I studied up and recently got my General, but I have basically no
equipment other than some SDR dongles and a Baofeng. I did manage to
cobble together a yagi that let me pull down both voice and data from a
couple satellites, by waving the antenna around in what I hoped was the
right direction. (I printed out the pass, but didn't and still don't
have a reliable way of tracking.)
What I want to do next is basically email myself over RF via space. I
know there's some store-and-forward sats, but that's about it.
I'd prefer to have an antenna that wouldn't need to track. I can limit
myself to passes over X deg (say 30) to get short ranges that don't need
high gain. But maybe the pass lengths won't be long enough to send and
receive in that time?
What I'm really looking for is tutorials. It's pretty easy to find ones
aimed at hams who don't know anything about satellites or
computers. It's hard to find ones for computer- and space-savvy people
who don't have a lot of practical experience with xmit/rcv.