Tagged: satellite

OrbitNight: A Free Browser-Based Satellite Pass Viewer with Antenna Rotator Control via Web Serial

Thank you to the OrbitNight team for writing in and sharing their "OrbitNight satellite radar", a free browser-based pass viewer for any satellite in the catalog. It can also point an antenna rotator straight from the browser over USB using Web Serial, so you don't need to install anything.

The radar page shows a polar plot of the pass track, live azimuth and elevation readouts, and an AOS/LOS countdown. A radio tab lists downlink and uplink frequencies taken from SatNOGS. For rotator control, it supports Yaesu GS-232 compatible controllers (including K3NG and ERC) and EasyComm II controllers like those used on SatNOGS stations connected over USB serial, or Bluetooth on Android. It also has an azimuth offset setting and a 1 degree deadband.

The site works in Chrome and Edge on desktop, and rotator control needs a browser that supports Web Serial. It's free and needs no sign-up. The team notes that there is no 450 degree or flip mode yet, and they'd like to hear from anyone who tries it with a real rotator. If you track LEO satellites with a directional antenna and an RTL-SDR, this could be a simpler option than setting up Gpredict and Hamlib. We note, however, that we couldn't find an open-source codebase.

The OrbitNight Live Tracking Page
The OrbitNight Live Tracking Page

DecSAT: A DVB-S/S2/S2X Satellite Receiver with Blind Scanning for the HackRF One

Thank you to RTL-SDR.COM reader Vitor for writing in and sharing DecSAT, an open-source Rust program by CasualArclamp that turns a HackRF One into a DVB-S/S2/S2X satellite receiver. It's laid out like SDR++, with a large waterfall and VFOs that you drop onto carriers, each running its own decoder.

DecSAT decodes DVB-S2 and S2X carriers, including ACM, and outputs MPEG-TS to VLC or its built-in TV player, and IP data to PCAP files for Wireshark. A blind 'Identify' mode works out an unknown carrier's symbol rate and modulation, and a 'Survey' tool acts like a blind scan, identifying and decoding every carrier in the span. It also supports various SCPC modem, voice, radar, and satellite beacon formats.

Portable Windows binaries are available on the original repo's releases page, and Vitor notes that he has created a fork that adds a Visual Studio 2022 build.

Update: Vitor notes that his fork as added several new features, including analogue modes such as WFM with RDS, analogue TV (PAL/NTSC) and integration to CrazyCat's streamreader.dll allowing use of compatible satellite tuners (mostly made by TBS) to setup the LNB (polarity, band and power), launch DiSEqC commands and blindscan and stream the actual TS back to DecSAT. He notes that these updates should eventually work their way back into the upstream code.

DecSAT Identifying Carriers in a Synthetic 8 MS/s Test Scene
DecSAT Identifying Carriers in a Synthetic 8 MS/s Test Scene

AI Disclaimer: Claude is listed as a contributor to the DecSAT repo.

Elektro-L3 Now Drifting West to 14.5°W: L-Band xRIT Could Return to Western Europe in October

Back in May, we posted about how Russia's Elektro-L3 geostationary weather satellite was expected to move from 76°E to 14.5°W, which would finally bring an unencrypted L-band LRIT/HRIT downlink over Western Europe. Thank you to RTL-SDR reader tec_msat for writing in and letting us know that the move now appears to be underway.

tec_msat writes that Elektro-L3 went quiet around September 10. Updated TLEs on September 13 then showed the satellite drifting west at roughly 1.7 degrees per day. Around September 20, its orbit was circularized, making it drift faster at around 3.1 degrees per day. At its current speed, it should reach 14.5°W around October 12. Based on Elektro-L5's commissioning timeline, test transmissions could begin within days of arrival.

Elektro-L5, launched in February 2026, has now been successfully commissioned at L3's old 76°E slot, which covers Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Russia and Australia. It has been transmitting GGAK, LRIT and HRIT, as well as X-band RDAS. With L5 taking over the eastern slot, L3 will replace the aging Elektro-L2 at 14.5°W. L2 never provided LRIT/HRIT from that position due to power supply issues, although the original Elektro-L1 did when it was stationed there.

Roscosmos noted in August, when announcing L5's commissioning, that L3 may be moved to 14.5°W. However, there has been no official announcement from Roscosmos that the relocation has started, so the drift observations currently come from amateur TLE tracking.

Once commissioned, L3 should once again make geostationary L-band weather imagery at 1691 MHz available to users in the UK, Ireland, Iceland, Portugal, Spain and western France. tec_msat also speculates that the signal may be stronger over Europe than it was from 76°E (potentially due to better elevation angles), making xRIT reception even easier.

If you're in the coverage area, now might be a good time to get your dish, feed and LNA ready. SatDump is the best software tool to use for reception and decode and our Discovery Dish with L-Band feed and RTL-SDR Blog V3 is a great starting point for hardware.

Expected Elektro L3/L4/L5 global coverage from mid-October 2026.
Expected Elektro L3/L4/L5 global coverage from mid-October 2026.

Hacking a Secondhand Marine Satellite Dish to Track Satellites with Gpredict

Thank you to Melan / Alex for submitting news about their project, where they reverse-engineered a second-hand Intellian i4 marine satellite dish, which retails new for around €4000 but which they picked up second-hand for about €200. The dish itself is a 40 cm prime-focus design with a quad LNB, beefy stepper motors, and a motorized sub-reflector implementing Intellian's Dynamic Beam Tilting (DBT) technology, where the small sub-reflector handles fast beam corrections so the main motors only deal with large movements.

The dish normally expects heading data from the boat via NMEA 0183 over RS-422, so Melan solved the "we're not on a boat" problem with an RP2040 and a TTL-to-RS-422 module spoofing $HCHDG compass sentences to the Antenna Control Unit. To avoid being tied to Intellian's Aptus software, they decompiled the C# application to reverse engineer the ACU's text-based serial protocol. They then wrote a shim making the dish appear as a generic rotator to Gpredict, and put it on the roof of Dutch hackerspace NURDspace, pulling in Ku-band satellite TV. 

The full write-up includes photos of the internals, an auto-generated protocol document, and a video of the dish doing a test dance.

The Intellian i4 Marine Satellite Dish Platform
The Intellian i4 Marine Satellite Dish Platform

New YouTube Tutorials for SatDump V2.x.x

Thank you to Paul Maine, who has submitted to us new SatDump tutorials that he has uploaded to his YouTube channel. The new tutorials focus on the new SatDump V2.x.x alpha version.

The first tutorial shows how to install SatDump 2.x.x, and how to obtain an EUMETSAT API key and use the 'Load First Party' feature to view and analyze satellite data downloaded from the internet. The second tutorial focuses on the nbew DSP Flowgraph feature, and the third discusses how Look Up Tables (LUTs) are used with satellite imagery.

E24 SatDump v2.x wip Part1

E25 SatDump v2.x wip Part2 DSPflowgraphs

E26 SatDump v2.x wip Part3 LUTs

Ground Station: An Open Source SDR Orchestration Platform for Satellite Tracking and Decoding

Over on GitHub, we've seen the release of a new program simply called "Ground Station", described as a full-featured, open-source software solution for satellite tracking and radio communication.

The software presents as a web-based UI that allows users to manage satellite passes, view SDR waterfall data, decode basic signals such as GMSK telemetry, view telemetry packets, synchronize TLEs, manage multiple SDR devices, browse downloaded weather imagery, monitor DSP performance, and interface with antenna rotators.

Unlike tools such as SatDump, which focus primarily on signal processing and decoding, Ground Station acts as a higher-level orchestration platform. It automates the full workflow, handling pass prediction, SDR control, recording, and decoding, and integrates with SatDump for more complex protocols like weather satellite image decoding.

While SatDump does include some tracking and automation features, Ground Station takes this further with support for multiple SDRs, coordination across multiple stations, and a centralized management interface. It also includes an interesting AI-based speech-to-text feature for transcribing amateur satellite voice communications.

This could be a great tool to use alongside our Discovery Dish and Discovery Drive antenna rotator!

Ground Station: The Overview Page
Ground Station: The Overview Page

Discovery Drive Campaign Now Live!

We're extremely pleased to announce that our campaign for our Discovery Drive automatic antenna rotator is now live on Crowd Supply! Pricing is reduced during the campaign period, so check it out soon!

Discovery Drive is an automatic antenna rotator designed for use with our Discovery Dish product, as well as similarly sized antennas such as Wi-Fi grid and Yagi antennas.

A motorized rotator, such as Discovery Drive, enables precise tracking of fast-moving polar orbiting satellites using a satellite dish or directional antenna. Examples of polar orbiting weather satellites include METEOR-M2, METOP, and FENGYUN. Depending on your location, you may also have access to other interesting satellites that dump data over specific regions.

In addition to public weather data, operators and enthusiasts might be interested in using Discovery Drive to track CubeSats, and amateur radio operators may wish to track amateur radio satellites.

Amateur radio astronomy hobbyists can map the galaxy in the hydrogen line spectrum using Stellarium, or custom software to aim a Discovery Dish with H-Line feed, allowing you to scan multiple parts of the sky in one night.

Discovery Drive - A Motorized Antenna Rotator Engineered for Discovery Dish

Iridium-Sniffer: A Standalone Iridium Satellite Burst Detector and Demodulator

Thank you to Aaron, who is most well known for creating the DragonOS distribution, for writing in and sharing with us a new open-source program he's recently released over on GitHub.

The program is called 'Iridium-Sniffer', and it is a standalone Iridium satellite burst detector and demodulator written in C. Typically, gr-iridium has been used for Iridium demodulation in the past, but it can be clunky and slow on lower-power embedded systems like the Raspberry Pi, as it requires the large GNU Radio dependency.

The program is compatible with iridium-toolkit, which performs the actual decoding and analysis of the Iridium packets demodulated by iridium-sniffer.

If you're not familiar with it, Iridium is a large global communications satellite constellation that provides services such as voice, messaging, and data. An antenna like our RTL-SDR Blog Active Patch antenna, combined with an SDR, can be used to receive these signals. Some data on Iridium is encrypted, but there is some unencrypted data that can be decoded when combining tools like iridium-sniffer and iridium-toolkit.

Iridium-sniffer is compatible with the HackRF, BladeRF, USRP (UHD), and SoapySDR (which includes RTL-SDR). Note that higher-bandwidth SDRs can receive much more of the ~30 MHz Iridium band, and therefore decode more data at once.

The Iridium Satellite Constellation
The Iridium Satellite Constellation