Es’hail-2 Amateur Transponder Now Active
Es'hail 2 was launched last November and it is the first geostationary satellite to contain an amateur radio transponder. The satellite is positioned at 25.5°E which is over Africa. It's reception footprint covers Africa, Europe, the Middle East, India, eastern Brazil and the west half of Russia/Asia. There are two amateur transponders on the satellite. One is a narrow band linear transponder which uplinks from 2400.050 - 2400.300 MHz and downlinks from 10489.550 - 10489.800 MHz. Another is a wide band digital transponder for amateur digital TV which uplinks from 2401.500 - 2409.500 MHz and downlinks from 10491.000 - 10499.000 MHz.
Although it launched last year it takes several months for the engineers to test and qualify the transponder for use. Over the last few weeks the transponder was intermittently active during the testing, but now since Feb 13 2019 the amateur transponder has finally been fully activated for amateur radio use.
To receive it with an RTL-SDR or most other SDRs an LNB is required to receive the 10 GHz signal and downconvert it into a frequency range that most SDRs support. Typically an Octagon LNB is used, and these are easy to find and cheap as they are often used for satellite TV.
From various reports seen on Twitter, it seems that the signal is strong enough that a satellite dish is not required for receiving - simply pointing the LNB directly at the satellite is enough.
#Eshail2 Unbelievable. 1st RX Test with my Smartphone, OTG, DVB-T Stick, Octagon LNB. No Dish !!! I hold the LNB in my Hand in the direction of Es Hail2 ... pic.twitter.com/SQjz7WPyzm
— Andreas Preuss (@DL5APR) February 13, 2019
If you can't set up a receiver, there is an OpenWebRX livestream of the Es'hail 2 narrowband channel that has been set up by Zoltan/RFSparkling which is available at sniffing.ddns.net:8073 (note the server can only handle 8 users at a time, so try again later if it's busy). Also as pointed out by KD9IXX on Twitter, there are also several websdr.org servers receiving and streaming Es'hail2 including an Airspy based one run officially by AMSAT-DL.
Apologize if my stream having some outage… The rtl-sdr dongle disconnects for some reason time to time and I had to restart OpenWebRX manually from terminal… Perhaps the RPi 3 USB having difficulties? I will try to connect an independent 5V for the rtl-sdr dongle later. If any of you guys have an idea / experience with similar problem please share. (RPi get stable 5V this is what I checked and improved recently but still halts once a day or so. )
Thanks
I really hope that we end up with something like this in the Western Hemisphere in the next few years. Listening to the websdrs, it basically sounds like an HF WARC band, but with zero noise.