How to Receive the Funcube Satellite with an RTL-SDR

Over on the Hamspirit.de blog author Jan as written a post explaining how to receive the FUNcube satellite with an RTL-SDR dongle (note in German, use Google translate). The FUNcube is a CubeSat (a low cost miniature 10 cm cube sized satellite) which is intended mainly for educating young people about radio, space, physics and electronics, but has also piqued the interest of amateur radio hobbyists.

Jan first writes how the Funcube Dongle was originally invented as a low cost means of receiving the FUNcube satellite, but now there are the even lower cost RTL-SDR dongles. Jan’s post then goes over how to receive the FUNcube at a frequency of 145.935 MHz using software such as SDR-Radio or SDR# and how to decode the telemetry data using the FUNcube dashboard. He also explains a bit about the FUNcubes operating modes which change the satellites transmission strength depending whether or not its solar panels are in sunlight or not.