Receiving Starlink satellite beacons on a budget
sgcderek.github.io
sgcderek.github.io
Not sure when it ends but if you’ve been thinking of dipping your toes into SDR these are good products. I’ve got both the R2 and HF+ products and enjoy them both. RTL’s can’t be beat for price alone but if you’re early distracted by hardware limitations they can be a challenge lol
> Whatever you decide to do with the signal, whether it’s Doppler analysis using software like strf or simply just listening to it for a while and showing it off to people, I hope this post was helpful and cleared things up. This is a unique opportunity to experiment with a whole different frequency band and hardware for SDR owners without having to spend obscene amounts of money on precision, custom, or obscure RF hardware and expensive SDRs.
So I'll ask a related followup: can one decode any information from these beacons?
Everything I’ve read about this so far leads me to believe these are just continuous tones that only carry information to the extent that they are operating at specific frequencies relative to other. I’m just casually interested in this stuff and my guess is these are probably used to help the receivers in the user terminals correct for doppler shift in the much quieter broadband transmission frequencies. I don’t know if ‘pilot tone’ would be correctly used here but that’s the term that comes to mind.
https://old.reddit.com/r/StarlinkEngineering/comments/qwm1v5...
I don’t believe they have attempted to decode it at all but i haven’t read all of the updates. They did confirm they do not see any modulation in these tones.
It’s basically RF photography. No particular utility, just fun to do for yourself.