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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?"
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!
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?
Try http://www.satobs.org It's a good starting point.