This came up in my Facebook feed and decided I’d give it a shot. But first some background. Per my previous post I’ve been trying to work the Greencube sat. Got the antennas up and received some data from the sat. It’s been in and out of repeater mode so I haven’t been able to make a voice contact yet. Switched over to the ISS and was receiving packets but not getting any up. Looks like something has happened in the voice circuit of the FT-847. There is a loud whine and the audio is very low. It has to be the rig interface which is upsetting as I had this repaired a couple years ago for the same issue. But the radio receives fine so I figured this event would be fun as you don’t transmit. Well as usual nothing goes as planned. Yesterday I was tracking the ISS and after the last pass something went wrong with the elevation rotor. After a few hours of troubleshooting it appears to be the controller box. Not sure if it’s the computer interface or the controller itself but it’s not working properly. Luckily I have another controller that I hooked up. No computer interface but that’s fine at least I’m ready to go. Because of all the issues I also set up a second station on a vertical antenna just in case.
Here is the FT-847. It’s running Black Cat SSTV, SDR Angel and MacDoppler. MacDoppler is handing the doppler correction on the FT-847 and also controlling the azimuth rotor. The audio on the Mac is being picked up off the first IF of the FT-847 with a RSPdx SDR. The audio out from the FT-847 is going to a Windows Surface computer. I was running everything through my mixing board but had issues, which is a whole other story.
Here are the rotors, Windows computer (fed from the FT-847) and the FT-991A as the backup rig. The Windows computer solution was a bust and didn’t decode anything.
Here is the other station. Running MacDoppler and controlling the FT-991A. Also running Black Cat SSTV and Multiscan 3B. Audio is piped into Blackhole so it can be shared to both programs. As luck would have it I forgot to take Multiscan 3B out of standby mode so only BC SSTV was decoding. As you can see in the pic the ISS was approaching.
Thank goodness for the backup system as the decode on the other system was terrible. While not perfect it I’m happy I was able to capture the transmission and upload it to ARISS. This pic was taken just as the ISS went out of range.
Well this was the final result. Actually not bad for a vertical antenna. Lot of lessons learned and much work to do to get the bugs ironed out of the satellite station. Going to have to take a look at the FT-847 and see if I can repair it or have to send it out. MacDoppler does have some support for dual radio setups if you don’t have a full duplex radio like the FT-847. I may try this with the FT-991A and IC-7100 as they are both supported. Hopefully this will work while I figure out what to do with the FT-847.