Recently I was contacted by the ground controller for the UmKA1 or RS40S cubesat. It's a small educational satellite assembled by a Russian high school, originally for astronomy but also for amateur radio. They wanted to send me a message at a specific time in the satellite's orbit and see if I could receive it. This took a couple tries, but eventually I got an SSTV picture from the cubesat. I was also able to decode some of the telemetry signals and look at the satellite's electrical system details. This is the first time I've tried to do anything with a cubesat, so it was kind of neat!
Some more info on the satellite is here: https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/u...
The decoding software is here: https://github.com/Foxiks/UmKA1_Tele...
I had more luck with this software to decode telemetry (along with the Soundmodem package from the github link):
https://sputnix.ru/en/satellitessput...
To decode the SSTV signals, I used this software:
https://hamsoft.ca/pages/mmsstv.php
I used this antenna:
https://amzn.to/3UXQdxK
I like the RTLSDR Blog series of software defined radios for stuff like this:
https://amzn.to/3Ig3t9a
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