Frugal Radio: Testing the Discovery Dish on Inmarsat AERO with JAERO and InmarScope
Over on YouTube, Rob from the 'Frugal Radio' channel has uploaded part one of a review of our Discovery Dish, which we sent over for testing. Rob used the Inmarsat L-band feed with an RTL-SDR Blog V4, SDR++ and JAERO to receive AERO signals from the 98W satellite, which sits at about 27 degrees elevation from Rob's location in central Alberta.
Rob notes that the 10500 bps channels, which carry most aviation traffic and are usually the hardest to decode, held a steady Eb/No (a signal-to-noise measure for digital signals) of 14-16 over several days of testing. For comparison, Rob's previous best of 10 came from a grid dish designed for 1.7 GHz GOES reception, while our RTL-SDR Blog L-band patch antenna peaked at 8. Rob also shows the dish assembly, which took about 30 minutes.
Later in the video, Rob briefly tries out InmarScope, the multichannel Inmarsat decoder from Sarah Rose that we posted about previously. It decoded every 600, 1200 and 10500 bps AERO channel at once and automatically followed a voice call when one was assigned. Part two will cover maritime EGC, GOES reception, or more InmarScope, depending on viewer feedback.
