satellite

175 Articles

Teardowns Show Off Serious Satellite Hardware

October 18, 2024 by 13 Comments

As hackers, we’re always pulling stuff apart—sometimes just to see what it’s like inside. Most of us have seen the inside of a computer, television, and phone. These are all common items that we come into contact with every day. Fewer of us have dived inside real spacey satellite hardware, if only for the lack of opportunity. Some good gear has landed on [Don]’s desk over the years though, so he got to pulling it apart and peering inside.

[Don] starts us off with a gorgeous… box… of some sort from Hughes Aircraft. He believes it to be from their Space & Communications group, and it seems to have something to do with satellite communications work. Externally, he gleans that it takes power and data hookups and outputs RF to, something… but he’s not entirely sure. Inside, we get a look at the old 90s electronics — lots of through hole, lots of big chunky components, and plenty of gold plating. [Don] breaks down the circuitry into various chunks and tries to make sense of it, determining that it’s got some high frequency RF generators in the 20 to 40 GHz range.

Scroll through the rest of [Don]’s thread and you’ll find more gems. He pulls apart a microwave transmitter from Space Micro — a much newer unit built somewhere around 2008-2011. Then he dives into a mysterious I/O board from Broad Reach, and a very old Hughes travelling wave tube from the 1970s. The latter even has a loose link to the Ford Motor Company, believe it or not.

Even if you don’t know precisely what you’re looking at, it’s still supremely interesting stuff—and all very satellite-y. We’ve seen some other neat satellite gear pulled apart before, too. Meanwhile, if you’ve been doing your own neat teardowns, don’t hesitate to let us know!

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Hackaday Links: September 29, 2024

September 29, 2024 by 16 Comments

There was movement in the “AM Radio in Every Vehicle Act” last week, with the bill advancing out of the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee and heading to a full floor vote. For those not playing along at home, auto manufacturers have been making moves toward deleting AM radios from cars because they’re too sensitive to all the RF interference generated by modern vehicles. The trouble with that is that the government has spent a lot of effort on making AM broadcasters the centerpiece of a robust and survivable emergency communications system that reaches 90% of the US population.

The bill would require cars and trucks manufactured or sold in the US to be equipped to receive AM broadcasts without further fees or subscriptions, and seems to enjoy bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. Critics of the bill will likely point out that while the AM broadcast system is a fantastic resource for emergency communications, if nobody is listening to it when an event happens, what’s the point? That’s fair, but short-sighted; emergency communications isn’t just about warning people that something is going to happen, but coordinating the response after the fact. We imagine Hurricane Helene’s path of devastation from Florida to Pennsylvania this week and the subsequent emergency response might bring that fact into focus a bit.

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Amateur Astronomer Images Spy Satellite

September 20, 2024 by 14 Comments

As anyone who’s looked at the sky just before dawn or right after dusk can confirm, for the last seventy years or so there have been all kinds of artificial satellites floating around in low-Earth orbit that are visible to the naked eye. Perhaps the most famous in the last few decades is the International Space Station, but there are all kinds of others up there from amateur radio satellites, the Starlink constellation, satellite TV, and, of course, various spy satellites from a few of the world’s governments. [Felix] seems to have found one and his images of it can be found here.

[Felix] has been taking pictures of the night sky for a while now, including many different satellites. While plenty of satellites publish their paths to enable use, spy satellites aren’t generally public record but are still able to be located nonetheless. He uses a large Dobsonian telescope to resolve the images of several different satellites speculated to be spy satellites, with at least one hosting a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system. His images are good enough to deduce the size and shape of the antennas used, as well as the size of the solar panels on board.

As far as being concerned about the ramifications of imaging top-secret technology, [Felix] is not too concerned. He states that it’s likely that most rival governments would be able to observe these satellites with much more powerful telescopes that he has, so nothing he has published so far is likely to be a surprise to anyone. Besides, these aren’t exactly hidden away, either; they’re up in the sky for anyone to see. If you want to take a shot at that yourself you can get a Dobsonian-like telescope mostly from parts at Ikea, and use a bit of off-the-shelf electronics to point them at just the right position too.

Catching The BOAT: Gamma-Ray Bursts And The Brightest Of All Time

September 18, 2024 by 12 Comments

Down here at the bottom of our ocean of air, it’s easy to get complacent about the hazards our universe presents. We feel safe from the dangers of the vacuum of space, where radiation sizzles and rocks whizz around. In the same way that a catfish doesn’t much care what’s going on above the surface of his pond, so too are we content that our atmosphere will deflect, absorb, or incinerate just about anything that space throws our way.

Or will it? We all know that there are things out there in the solar system that are more than capable of wiping us out, and every day holds a non-zero chance that we’ll take the same ride the dinosaurs took 65 million years ago. But if that’s not enough to get you going, now we have to worry about gamma-ray bursts, searing blasts of energy crossing half the universe to arrive here and dump unimaginable amounts of energy on us, enough to not only be measurable by sensitive instruments in space but also to effect systems here on the ground, and in some cases, to physically alter our atmosphere.

Gamma-ray bursts are equal parts fascinating physics and terrifying science fiction. Here’s a look at the science behind them and the engineering that goes into detecting and studying them.

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Pulling Apart An Old Satellite Truck Tracker

September 13, 2024 by 9 Comments

Sometimes there’s nothing more rewarding than pulling apart an old piece of hardware of mysterious origin. [saveitforparts] does just that, and recently came across a curious satellite system from a surplus store. What else could he do, other than tear it down and try to get it humming? 

The device appeared to be satellite communication device for a tracking unit of some sort, complete with a long, thick proprietary cable. That led to a junction box with a serial port and an RJ45 port, along with some other interfaces. Disassembly of the unit revealed it contained a great deal of smarts onboard, including some kind of single-board computer. Comms-wise, it featured a cellular GPRS interface as well as an Orbcomm satellite modem. It also packed in GPS, WiFi, Xbee, Ethernet, and serial interfaces. It ultimately turned out to be a Digi ConnectPort X5 device, used as a satellite tracking system for commercial trucks.

What’s cool is that the video doesn’t just cover pulling it apart. It also dives into communicating with the unit. [saveitforparts] was able to power it up and, using the manufacturer’s software, actually talk to the device. He even found the web interface and tested the satellite modem.

Ultimately, this is the kind of obscure industry hardware that most of us would never come into contact with during our regular lives. It’s neat when these things show up on the secondary market so hackers can pull them apart and see what makes them tick. Video after the break.

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Hackaday Links: August 4, 2024

August 4, 2024 by 8 Comments

Good news, bad news for Sun watchers this week, as our star launched a solar flare even bigger than the one back in May that gave us an amazing display of aurora that dipped down into pretty low latitudes. This was a big one; where the earlier outburst was only an X8.9 class, the one on July 23 was X14. That sure sounds powerful, but to put some numbers to it, the lower end of the X-class exceeds 10-4 W/m2 of soft X-rays. Numbers within the class designate a linear increase in power, so X2 is twice as powerful as X1. That means the recent X14 flare was about five times as powerful as the May flare that put on such a nice show for us. Of course, this all pales in comparison to the strongest flare of all time, a 2003 whopper that pegged the needle on satellite sensors at X17 but was later estimated at X45.

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Hackaday Links: May 12, 2024

May 12, 2024 by 9 Comments

Don’t pack your bags for the trip to exoplanet K2-18b quite yet — it turns out that the James Webb Space Telescope may not have detected signs of life there after all. Last year, astronomers reported the possible presence of dimethyl sulfide there, a gas that (at least on Earth) is generally associated with phytoplankton in the ocean. Webb used its infrared spectrometer instruments to look at the light from the planet’s star, a red dwarf about 111 light-years away, as it passed through the hydrogen-rich atmosphere. The finding was sort of incidental to the discovery of much stronger signals for methane and carbon dioxide, but it turns out that the DMS signal might have just been overlap from the methane signal. It’s too bad, because K2-18b seems to be somewhat Earth-like, if you can get over the lack of oxygen and the average temperature just below freezing. So, maybe not a great place to visit, but it would be nice to see if life, uh, found a way anywhere else in the universe.

Attention Fortran fans: your favorite language isn’t quite dead yet. In fact, it cracked the top ten on one recent survey, perhaps on the strength of its numerical and scientific applications. The “Programming Community Index” is perhaps a bit subjective, since it’s based on things like Google searches for references to particular languages. It’s no surprise then that Python tops such a list, but it’s still interesting that there’s enough interest in a 67-year-old programming language to make it onto the list. We’d probably not advise building a career around Fortran, but you never know.

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