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Deep Space DX Hack Chat

Reach out and touch someone

Wednesday, March 5, 2025 12:00 pm PDT - Wednesday, March 5, 2025 01:00 pm PDT Local time zone:
Hack Chat
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David Prutchi will host the Hack Chat on Wednesday, March 5 at noon Pacific.

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In the past 70-odd years, the world's space-faring nations have flung a considerable amount of hardware out into the Void. Most of it has fallen back into Earth's gravity well, and a lot of what remains is long past its best-by date, systems silenced by time and the harsh conditions that rendered these jewels of engineering into little more than space flotsam.

Luckily, though, there are still a few spacecraft plying the lonely spaces between the planets and even beyond that still have active radios, and while their signals may be faint, we can still hear them. True, many of them are reachable only using immense dish antennas. 

Not every deep-space probe needs the resources of a nation-state to be snooped on, though. David Prutchi has been listening to them for years using a relatively modest backyard antenna farm and a lot of hard-won experience. He's been able to bag some serious DX, everything from rovers on Mars to probes orbiting Jupiter. If you've ever wanted to give deep space DX a try, here's your chance to get off on the right foot.

  • Hack Chat Transcript

    Tom Nardi03/05/2025 at 23:05 2 comments

    Dan Maloney  3:00 PM
    OK folks, good afternoon and welcome to the Hack Chat! I'm Dan, I'll be modding today along with Dusan as we welcome David Prutchi to the chat. We're talking Deep Space DX, and I'm pretty excited about it myself. Welcome David!
    David Prutchi  3:01 PM
    Thank you Dan! Excited to be here!
    Dan Maloney  3:02 PM
    So how did you get into satellite listening? It's not really an everyday hobby, is it?
    David Prutchi  3:02 PM
    It's not golf for certain...
    Boian Mitov  3:03 PM
    Hello @David Prutchi :-)
    David Prutchi  3:03 PM
    I grew up in Ecuador, where NASA had a tracking station at the base of the Cotopaxi volcano. I would go there as often as I could get my dad to take me. I was present during the tracking of the Apollo-Soyuz missions and that got me hooked.
    amiboy  3:04 PM
    hello all
    Ben Wasserman  3:05 PM
    Hi David!
    Dan Maloney  3:05 PM
    That's so cool! I tend to think of the DSN now as pretty much just the three stations in CA, Spain, and Oz. But back then it was truly globe-spanning
    Dan Maloney  3:06 PM
    And for anyone who hasn't seen David's current setup:
    Dan Maloney  3:06 PM
    https://hackaday.com/2025/01/25/making-the-longest-distance-radio-contact-possible/
    David Prutchi  3:06 PM
    Boys don't grow up - their toys just get more expensive :)
    Dan Maloney  3:06 PM
    Tell me you don't live in an HOA with telling me you don't live in an HOA
    David Prutchi  3:07 PM
    Actually, we do, but their regulations forgot to mention antennas! I applied for permits from my township for every one of them to avoid issues.
    David Prutchi  3:09 PM
    Our backyard has a perfect, undisturbed view of the Southern sky too, so I get almost horizon-to-horizon coverage
    Dan Maloney  3:09 PM
    That's fantastic! Not a fan of HOAs myself. I'm envious of that solar aspect
    Ben Wasserman  3:10 PM
    How much do you notice polarization changes on you from randomly polarized sources? I've heard the atmosphere tends to circularly polarize, but randomly.
    Ben Wasserman  3:11 PM
    Aka, from a source that doesn't already have a circularly polarized antenna.
    David Prutchi  3:14 PM
    Well, the deep-space probes all use circularly-polarized antennas, and that's where I would notice a dB up or down. I haven't really looked at polarization from linear or random polarization. However, there is some interesting work that Scott Tilley (VE7TIL, skyriddles.wordpress.com, X: coastal8049) with his polarimetric setup
    David Prutchi  3:15 PM
    *is doing
    FedX  3:16 PM
    I came across this NASA radar probe the other day, and I am curious, have you ever thought about dish deployment in space for communication? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLw3veKBqo0
    David Prutchi  3:18 PM
    Thanks for the link. I'll check out the video.
    FedX  3:20 PM
    Of course! It was a seriously cool mechanism!
    David Prutchi  3:20 PM
    I'm not sure about the cost/benefit for a nation state to park a communications dish in space since the atmosphere doesn't cause much attenuation at the microwave frequencies used, so it's much easier/cheaper to point and maintain a large earth-bound dish than in space.
    David Prutchi  3:21 PM
    I was chatting earlier with Ben Wasserman about laser use for deep space communications with high bandwidth. Maybe there being outside the atmosphere may be worthwhile. Ben?
    FedX  3:22 PM
    Ah, that makes sense. I was more asking about if you had considered dish deployment for deep space probes to maintain radio contact longer. Sorry if I misspoke that.
    bashcypher  3:24 PM
    Do you have examples of the signals you pick up? Files on google docs or youtube? How do you de-modulate them? Would a logic analyzer convert to binary?...
    Read more »

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