With an ever-developing constellation of Starlink satellites whizzing all over more than our heads, you could possibly be getting the urge to begin experimenting with the substantial-speed net provider. But at $100 or far more a thirty day period plus components, the barrier to entry is just a little daunting for a large amount of us. No problems, while — if all you’re interested in is tracking [Elon]’s birds, it’s truly a quite very simple career.
Now, we’re not claiming that you will be ready to hook up to Starlink and get online company with this set up, of study course, and neither is the delightfully named [saveitforparts]. Instead, his setup just gets the beacon signals from Starlink satellites, which is fairly attention-grabbing all by alone. The hardware consists of his “Picorder” mobile machine, which athletics a Raspberry Pi, a little Liquid crystal display display screen, and a host of sensors, including an RTL-SDR dongle. To decide on up the satellite beacons, he employed a dust-low-priced universal Ku-band LNB, or lower-sound block downconverter. They are generally located at the focal stage of a satellite Television set dish, but in this circumstance no dish is desired — just electricity it up with a power injector and place it to the sky. The signals present up on the Picorder’s display screen in waterfall manner curiously, the waterfall traces seem quite identical to the styles the satellites make in the evening sky, considerably to the consternation of astronomers.
Of program, you really do not have to have a Picorder to snoop in on Starlink — any laptop computer and SDR should really work, in spite of [saveitforparts]’ difficulty in accomplishing so. You should not have a great deal trouble replicating the success by pursuing the movie underneath, which also has a couple of guidelines on powering an LNB for portable operations.
[via RTL-SDR.com]
Resource : https://hackaday.com/2022/09/23/snooping-on-starlink-with-an-rtl-sdr/