On the roof

All the three of us stayed over at Tom’s place to get ready for our first antenna test. Our alarms rang in the middle of the night, and, bleary-eyed, we went up to the roof and prepared the antennas and the Airspy, in order to try to receive the signal of the LES-1. (And with just enough time for a quick our-fearless-adventurers-sally-forth portrait.)

Our time frame looks like this:

• Rising: 05:58:17
• Peak: 06:09:41
• Setting: 06:21:07

So this means that shortly after 6am, the satellite will be at its highest in the sky. From our perspective, it means that it will be travelling from west to east, just above the height of the moon, in the southern sky.

We know what frequency we were looking for (237 mHz) and we know that the signal is fragmented and weak, and altering every four seconds.

We started with the first antenna, Peter, to roughly locate the signal. After some initial setup futzing, we started listening. A few minutes later, a weak droning beep — with a matching tiny signal on the spectrogram — became audible, coming around about every 4 seconds. We were fairly sure that it was the signal that we were looking for. So, we decided to switch antennas (from Peter to Heather), in order to try to get a stronger and more precise signal. But in the time it took to switch antennas, the signal was gone.

We tried switching back again, but we didn’t get the signal again within our time frame. Frustrating. But a beginning, nonetheless.

Time to go back to bed and get a rest. We have four more days when the LES-1 will be above Berlin during sunlight hours.