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Satellite Monitoring in a Turbulent World?
Arimathea asks: "I've spent the past week searching for information on the Web on how to do utility monitoring of satellites - i'm primarily interested in viewing unedited feeds from major news networks, but I'd also be quite curious to learn about monitoring of government, military, and NASA satellites for voice, data, and video. This information is scattered all over the place. Can anyone provide an introduction on this, pointers to good books, web sites, or equipment providers?"
I've got a feeling that if anyone posts the information this guy's askin' for, Slashdot will be shut down for aiding Terrorists, and CmdrTaco and crew will sit in a cell down in Cuba awaiting to be formerly charged with anything. God bless America.
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
DO NOT CLICK
Or don't click if you're at work.
Aren't most of these broadcasts encrypted now? Not only would it make it harder to eavesdrop but also illegal. Granted if you just sit around listening to this stuff you probably wont get caught but if you do what would happen? I don't imagine that whatever would happen would be all that pleasant or in accordance with your civil rights.
In Republican America phones tap you.
For live NASA feeds, check out NASA TV. I watch it every morning while I'm working out. It's mostly stuff for kids at that early hour, but they also broadcast rocket launches, space station dockings, etc.
Shortwave Radio Hobbiests do this all the time. In fact, I believe there is a satellite that is open for use by the shortwave enthusiasts, put into orbit via donations and some private capital.
Samus is correct, most commercial and military communications will be encrypted. I would also add that there are enough stories to show that trying to decrypt this stuff without showing some discretion has gotten some people into hot water with the government.
A decent program for monitoring satellites is Starry Night Pro. It can be purchased via Space.com. Even without the satellite stuff, it's a fun program. It's nice when you look up into the sky and wonder, "What the hell is that?," you have a resource to use and find out.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
I can get you that info! Just reply to this post with your Name, address, home/work/cell phone number and the times its convenient for us to kick down your door.
Thanks in Advance,
Jack Bauer, CTU
What, me Tweet?
Usenet newsgroups: alt.video.satellite.mpeg-dvb, rec.video.satellite.tvro
Google keywords: satellite wild feeds
Note that these sources are useful no matter where in the world you are; they're not U.S. specific.
Have fun.
It's amateur radio (ham) operators that do this.
While "shortwave" includes the ham bands, "shortwave hobbiests" are unlicensed listeners and most of the time focus on the shortwave broadcasters. Hams are licensed to transmit on a number of allocated bands, at power levels up to 1.5 kilowatts with no ERP limits in most cases. (i.e. you can have as much antenna gain as you want.)
Amateur operation isn't limited to HF. (The world below 30 MHz) Hams operate on VHF, UHF, and even microwave. (10 GHz and 24 GHz are popular thanks to the abundance of surplus Gunn diode sources at those bands - Supermarket motion detectors can be retuned to the amateur bands and made into a transmitter.)
There are quite a few amateur-operated satellites. http://www.amsat.org/ is a great resource for these units. (Almost all are registered with AMSAT.) "shortwave" has nothing do do with these sats, almost NONE of them operate in the HF bands. (A small handful have downlinks on 28 MHz, none have HF uplinks because the ionosphere woudl block the signal.) The most common bands used by ham sats are 2 meters (144-148 MHz) and 70 centimeters (440 MHz), although they go up to the microwave region. AO-40 (aka Phase IIID) was slated to run on 6-7 different bands, including a band adjacent to the 2.4 GHz ISM band. Unfortunately only 2-3 transponders are operational - During assembly, someone screwed up and connected the fuel lines to the orbit adjustment engine wrong and it exploded when they tried to execute their first engine burn. It's amazing how much of that sat they've been able to get operational despite the explosion.
Government and communications sats? I don't think so. These are all going to be encrypted. The exception are some scientific satellites, which have data downlinks in the clear. (Best example of this are the NOAA orbiters - Yes, you can receive weather satellite data at home, both from polar orbiters and the geostationary NOAA sats. I believe the non-weather earth-imaging Landsats use the same modulation scheme as the NOAA orbiters.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
cnn.com
...OOOOHHHH!!!! You are just asking for a visit from the Dept of Homeland Security!!!!
-M-
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
Useless, all the information goes through layers of multiplexers and is encrypted before it gets to the first multiplexer.
You may break the encryption(not likely), but by the time you do, the next key is being used. In the event of you breaking the encryption, you still have to demultiplex the data several times to get any useful information. Not to mention most links use multi-phase modulation and error correction. You would need to know all this information as well as how to demodulate it.
Quit wasting your time, the encryption is too strong for the alloted tiume to break it and you couldn't even touch the unencrypted data without first knowing how it was multiplexed. And guess what, you cant even begin to break the encryption without first demodulating and demultiplexing.
They will also sometime encrypt data between multiplexors. Uhh oh, where do you stop demultiplexing and start decrypting? The world may never know.
Great, weird movie directed by David Cronenberg. This guy runs a little TV station. He tunes in to some unauthorized satellite feeds, and encounters the terrible Videodrome !
VOS/Interreality project: www.interreality.org
In the 1970's most of the NOAA weather satellite broadcasts were unencrypted SSTV-like VHF transmissions, but I honestly don't know how much this has changed. It may be the same - all the TV channels obviously get satellite weather pictures in near-real-time.
Hmmm... 2003-03-24 04:29:41 Finding war backhaul feeds on the Big Dish? (askslashdot,media) (rejected)
I have an analog BUD that can hit both horizons. The problem I've found, is that not a lot of signals are being broadcast Clear To Air anymore. Except for breaking news or sporting events being broadcast to a host of affiliates, almost everything is getting encrypted.
And unfortunately, a lot of the CTA signals that are still around are moving to digital. Unfortunately I can't justify the cost of upgrading our Chaparral analog C/KU receivers to digital, because we don't use our analog receiver that much to begin with.
Plus, wild feed websites are disappearing and/or not being updated. I'll end up finding a killer website with a full list of CTA radio and video signals, only to glance at the date and see it hasn't been updated since 1999.
Aside from usenet postings and Lyngsat (which is getting hit-or-miss), accurate information is sparse at best. Anyone have a good sat information repository that is updated frequently?
Try http://www.satobs.org It's a good starting point.