The Outernet L-band feed is now carrying a condensed version of the AMSAT and ARISS weekly news files. (Global Geosat coverage except for Northern Alaska)...
Receivers are simple: http://aprs.org/outnet.html
For ARISS, I manually added a 2 char grid square to each school listed in the school schedule and am asking the outernet folks to parse out that location info and plot a 1200 km footprint on their weather globe showing where people can tune in the ARISS contacts. Then their RTL-SDR dongle could then actually be retuned to hear the contact. Just an idea...
Bob, WB4APR
-----Original Message----- From: AMSAT-BB [mailto:amsat-bb-bounces@amsat.org] On Behalf Of Dani EA4GPZ Sent: Saturday, October 15, 2016 7:36 AM To: amsat-bb@amsat.org Subject: Re: [amsat-bb] New Outernet L-Band service...
I hope someday a service like this will be available from an AMSAT geostationary service.
I'm pretty confident that the guys at AMSAT-DL are capable of doing this much better on the upcoming EsHail'2 than what Outernet is currently doing on Inmarsat...
They already have in mind a "DVB-S beacon"... broadcast from the ground station at Qatar ... carrying videos about Ham radio and Ham radio events on this signal.
What is more, if you have equipment to operate EsHail'2 on SSB, it's more or less easy to use either the narrowband transponder or the wideband transponder to transmit an Outernet-type signal through EsHail'2, so anyone can have a go with this.
Outernet uses 4200baud BPSK and half of the bitrate is spent for FEC. You can use a bit less bitrate to get a signal that will even pass through a conventional 2.7kHz SSB filter and you can use less bits for FEC to get increased data throughput (but more SNR required).
Dani EA4GPZ.