I have to admit, I’ve been interested in the concept of using satellites for amateur radio operation for quite some time. This video is intended for newcomers to working satellites and, specifically, QO-100 Geostationary satellite, using the DX Patrol Groundstation.
QO-100 is a joint project between the Qatar Satellite Company (Es'hailSat), the Qatar Amateur Radio Society (QARS), and AMSAT Deutschland (AMSAT-DL) which provided the technical lead.
The geostationary satellite (officially named Es’hail-2) was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in 2018. It carries the first amateur radio transponders to be put into geostationary orbit and which provides coverage for radio amateurs from Brazil to Thailand and from Greenland to India and South Africa. The transponders operate with an uplink on 2.4 GHz (13-cm band) and downlink on 10.45 GHz (3-cm band) A 250 kHz bandwidth linear transponder intended for conventional analogue operations and an 8 MHz bandwidth transponder for experimental digital modulation schemes and DVB amateur television.
QO-100 has clearly been designed to be straightforward for amateurs to use. Both the uplink and the downlink are in amateur bands, the uplink is adjacent to the 2.4GHz wifi band, so there is lots of hardware, such as high gain antennas, available. The downlink is adjacent to the frequencies used for commercial satellite TV, which means that existing satellite TV dishes and LNBs can be repurposed for use with the satellite.
DX-Patrol, is a small accompany, based in Portugal, who design and manufacturer equipment specifically for use by amateurs who wish to operate on QO-100. They released their first iteration of the QO-100 Groundstation during 2021 – This was the advent of an ‘all-in-one’ solution which contains all the electronics necessary to provide the amateur radio user with a turnkey RX and TX solution. Since then, the company have released a follow up QO-100 Groundstation 2.0, which provides full duplex operation. Further details are available here: [ Ссылка ]
Online webSDR for listening to QO-100: [ Ссылка ]
AMSAT Dish pointing tool: [ Ссылка ]
The satellite finder app I used in the video is Satellite Finder (DishAligner) from Exultation.de
