SARSAT downlinks

[zguy1243]

http://www.uhf-satcom.com/lband/sarsat/


Anyone venture to give this a try? Should be able to hear some good stuff across the sat from the VHF and UHF guard frequencies the sat retransmits. Gonna try to receive this here with a old MTI inmarsat dish and the ICOM R8500's 10.7 IF of the tuned 1.6 gig freq fed into the Racal 6790 tuned IF+47Khz like it says. Was curious if anyone else has experimented with this.

Jody

[xz]

Hi,

There are a few of us in europe that monitor sarsats. Its quite interesting the stuff you hear, for example in the 406MHz downlink meant for epirbs, we can hear a studio-to-transmitter link operating in north africa, its at the bottom edge of the transponder. We've also heard taxi companies in the same tpx. On the 243 and 121.5 tpx's you can hear air traffic from all over europe, plus a lot of general chatter on the so-called emergency frequencies. We've even heard acars traffic on the 121.5 which decoded to a German plane, why it was tx'ing here is anyones guess.

To listen to these satellites, we're using tracking antennas of about 1m diameter. The other interesting sarsats are those on board geo-sats, for example on meteosat MSG1 we can hear US companies in the 406MHz band. You can have more chat on this at http://www.hearsat.org/irc - my nick is pjm there.

regards,

Paul.