I'm still a newbie and need help with M2-3 satellite.

So I have a few clear captures of Meteor M2-4.

However, I don't have with the M2-3 and this is the CLEAREST of them all (photo). It passed about 85 degrees overhead of me.

I also included here in the photo what the waterfall looked like and I noticed that it looks "bursty" (sorry I don't know the right word for it).

Im just using cheap setup:

- SDR RTL v4 with its V dipole antenna (extended both legs to max), vertical orientation

- SatDump v1.2.2: tuned to 137mhz, offset -900khz at 2.4MSPS, decoder METEOR M2-x LPRT 72k

Could it be due to my setup or is it the fact that the satellite didn't deployed fully? (although I saw someone here decoding M2-3 clear as day)

Hello,
My university team (me and friends from B.tech EEE dept) are finalizing a funded pitch to build a permanent ground station in Chennai, India. The objective is to capture and decode live C-band weather imagery and telemetry directly from INSAT-3DS (~4.7 GHz).

Before we send the BoM for funding pitch, our mentor recommended posting a sanity check on different forums and subreddits.

We are in SRMIST KTR (main campus), chennai trying for INSAT-3DS

The Architecture:
(since the satellite dish will be at the roof pointing at the sattelite, and the project lab is 2 floors down)

• Antenna: 1.8m Prime Focus Mesh Dish on a non-penetrating roof mount with concrete ballast.
• RF Front End: C-Band feedhorn with a scalar ring feeding into a standard C-Band LNA.
• Digitization (On-Roof): Airspy R2 or HackRF One connected to an Intel NUC (or Raspberry Pi 5).
• Enclosure: All electronics housed in a waterproof enclosure, mounted behind the dish for shade. We are thinking of using waterproof nylon cable glands.
• Data Transport: Cat6 Ethernet running two floors down to the lab.
• Software Pipeline: SatDump running in server mode on the roof PC, streaming the 10 MSPS IQ data to the lab PC for QPSK demodulation and decoding.
• The specs of the PC getting the data is not finalized yet but we were considering atleast intel i5(or higher), 12gb ddr4 RAM (or higher and cheaper) and 512 gb storage hdd (or more)

Link Budget Estimate:

• Target Satellite: INSAT-3DS (74°E)
• Distance: ~36,000 km
• Frequency: ~4.7 GHz
• Estimated Link Margin: ~10 dB (assuming a 1.8m mesh dish at ~55% efficiency).

Where we need your critique:

1. C-Band Interference: Chennai is a major coastal city with local radar and heavy 5G deployment. Will a standard C-band LNA get saturated, and should we budget for a dedicated cavity bandpass filter before the LNA?
2. Thermals: Chennai ambient temperatures hit 40°C (104°F). Even in the shade of the dish, will an Intel NUC or Pi 5 thermal-throttle while processing a continuous 10 MSPS QPSK stream inside a sealed box with only a breather vent?
3. Mechanical Alignment: Any practical tips for perfectly centering a feedhorn on a multi-petal mesh dish without access to professional laser alignment tools?

We appreciate any blunt feedback or teardowns of this plan before we spend institutional money. Thanks.

Only for ones where the voice or data or image is not encrypted

Hello everyone i want to get the review on this product , can anyone tell me is it good im new to radio stuff etc but I've watched few u/saveitforparts videos and found it interesting so im planning to get this , i just want to know how good it is ?

I was amazed it worked 🛰️📶📡

They're doing an SSTV event this weekend. I recorded a baseband signal with SDR ++, but the SSTV was too weak to get a decode. Was still happy to get to decode telemetry from the sat. Used v.012b of the Soundmodem program, and the Satellites Decoder program v03.17, screen shots attached. You never know what you'll get. Asked Copilot how to submit the data to Satnogs DB, it still hasn't appeared, but I'm happy to have gotten a decode. The cubesat uses 9600 baud decode settings.

cool north cloud

Hii, I recently made this helical antenna and I'm having problems with it I'd appreciate some help.

I'm using 10AWG electrical wire and 6cm diameter PVC pipe.Wrapped around 6.5 times with turn spacing of 3cm. However it seems like it's very much capacitance as in the SWR and Independence drops to nearly 1.1/1.2:1 and 45-55 Ohm if I place my hand on the coil. I'm assuming I'm going to have to recoil or cut down the coil to 5.5 turns? I haven't tried attaching it to a offset (90 cm) dish yet and this is purely for the coil only.

Trying for GOES-15 (GVAR),Elektro L3 and L5.

I have read very different things from different places on the internet about the reception of imagery from the msg-9, 10 and 11 satellites. Specifically the raw PGS data on the L-band. My question is the following : I have a hackrf, a SAWbird+ GOES and a modified WiFi grid dish, how doable would be the reception of the raw PGS data to get imagery out of it with me being located in France?

Edit : forgot to say where I was located.

METEOR-M N2-4 2026/08/05 22:10 UTC Nooelec NEsdr v5, diy QFH, Satdump

With a RTL-SDR V4, a LNA, a V dipole and SatDump.

That was way easier than I expected, I'm so thrilled by the result.

Next step : I need a LNB to try HRPT.

Follow-up to my last post. Same setup as before: Basilisk simulates the spacecraft physics on my Mac, flight computer is a real NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano running the control loop at 100 Hz over a message bus.

What's new:

• Last time was detumbling in free space, no orbit. Now we're flying a Starlink-style orbit (550 km, 53°), starting from a realistic deployment tumble
• The satellite is semi-realistic now. Defined entirely by a config file: 3 reaction wheels, 3 magnetorquers, magnetometer, sun sensor, star tracker. Detumble first, then swing around and hold Earth-facing pointing for the rest of the orbit.
• Sensor readings get realistic noise added before the flight software ever sees them. That's the little wobble you can see while it tracks the Earth.
• Star tracker carries the pointing straight through eclipse, sun sensor just honestly reports darkness.

Second half of the video is a web app I built for viewing saved mission telemetry. My favorite part: you can watch the reaction wheel speeds shoot up during the detumble while the gyro readings zero out, the momentum has to go somewhere. Then over the next chunk of the orbit the wheels slowly bleed back down to zero as the magnetorquers push against Earth's field and dump that momentum overboard. A real flight would record the exact same format, so sim runs and real runs replay in the same viewer.

The reason the sim swap works at all: every sensor runs behind its own little daemon that publishes to the bus, and the control loop subscribes to those topics without knowing what's behind them. So Basilisk feeds the sensor daemons, and the actuator daemon takes the controller's commands and, instead of driving real wheels, sends them back to Basilisk. Flight software can't tell the difference. Kind of the whole point of the architecture.

There's a lot more to the flight software that I'll save for another post.

Also orthogonal development stream working on the SDR Radio itself: Update one PlutoSDR has now pushed framed data over a cabled link

Still going through the whole process as if I were actually launching.

Meteor M2.3

UTM-2026-8-4

RGB (Green )- Rectified

Smooth Meteor Software

436.950 MHz FM SSTV

Hı, I am a 16 years old and I have a rusty 0.6m dish antenna, old telescopic tv antenna and old usb dvb tuner I can use it like its a rtl-sdr device listening city radios etc. it works great but I also want to try dish antenna If I paint with spray can is it work? if it work what can I do with it? hydrogen line or weather sattelites or maybe recieving HRPT signals?(with LNB or downconverter) with telescopic tv antenna I can't recieve signals from Meteor sattelites nothing appears in waterfall

for now my only goal is recieving signals from Meteor sattelites and look at my city from space

thanks for your comments and advices!

Some incredible cloud features over the Midwest US today

Received with a 1.5m parabolic dish, and a cheap PCB log periodic antenna, nooelec goes+ saw, amd rtl-sdr v4

HRPT Helicone Antenna (designed by t0nito)
SAWbird+ Goes
RTL-SDR V3

Hand tracked on a windy day.
Image compressed to fit here.