How to adjust your parabolic antenna for QO-100 / Es’Hail amateur radio geostationary satellite

VIDEO. How to adjust your dish for QO-100 geostationary satellite:

  • Find Astra 28,2 degrees (strong signals in Northern Europe and Central Europe) with a low cost satfinder with sound / analog meter
  • This is one of the most eastern TV satellites that are very strong, so you can start east and move towards south until you find the first strong satellite on your satfinder (you should find Astra 28,2)
  • Now move a slight bit more to the south until you are out of the strong Ku band lobe of the Astra 28,2
  • You should point in the correct direction (elevation is the same in practice)
  • If you have a generic LNB the IF should be on 739,7 MHz. Your SDR should be able to tune to that QRG

Join our FB group (exclusively for licenced radio amateurs by the respective government administrations) https://www.facebook.com/groups/252645695661305/members/

Tytera TYT-390 GPS setup

To set up GPS on the TYT-390, make an own contact with name GPS and call ID 5057

 

 

 

 

 

Then set up Destination ID: GPS under GPS settings. Set the interval to 60s or more. (Not too often as GPS packets take repeater capacity)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now select “GPS system 1” under the channels you want GPS enabled on. I have made a set of channels with GPS on and a set of channels with GPS off.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Brandmeister dashboard, go to Services/Self Care and select chinese radio. Check that your call and your name looks OK (you need an account at Brandmeister).

 

 

 

Then program your radio with the codeplug with the radio settings above.

Set your radio outside for several minutes to achieve GPS lock (can take quite some time).

You should see a globe symbol show up without the red ring (red ring means no GPS lock).

Then you can check aprs.fi for your callsign.

How to upgrade the firmware of your Funcube dongle

I had some problems of getting my Funcube dongle (purchased dec 2011) to work with SDR-RADIO version 1.5 build 879 (beta). The reason was that the funcube dongle didn’t have the latest firmware.

The www.funcubedongle.com webpage is a bit unclear about how to do the upgrade, so here I have written up how to upgrade the software.

 

1 ) Goto www.funcubedongle.com

2 ) Select downloads

3 ) Download Windows fully functional front end

4 ) Download Boot loader with source code

5 ) Unzip those two archives in a suitable directory. (If you need a free zip tool, you can use the free WinRar software that you can download from Rarlabs homepage http://www.rarlab.com/ )

6 ) Make sure you close all other SDR programs that may acess the funcube dongle. This is important so that the funcube is not “occupied” by another program

7 ) Plug in your funcube dongle to one of your USB ports

8 ) Wait 10 secs and listen for the “bling” sound that windows sends to signal that a new USB unit was detected

9 ) Start the FCHID.exe file (the front end)

You should now see something like this –>

image

10 ) Click the read device. You should now NOT see any error message. In case the read went ok, you now have a connection to your funcube dongle

11 ) You now want to set the funcube dongle in the bootloader mode. This means that the funcube is ready to boot from new software.

Here comes the confusing part: you must start another piece of software to upload the new firmware to the funcube. You cannot do that from the FCHID.exe file. The software you use for uploading the firmware is FCHIDBL.exe

12) Start FCHIDBL.exe (from the CHIDBL___Win32_Debug subdirectory where you unzipped the Boot loader with source code ) file from point 4) above

13) Download the latest firmware from Firmware v18i – Save it to the same directory as you saved the other files.  NOTE per Jan 2012 this was the latest software but this may have changed when you read this !!! Check what is the latest file before you upgrade!

14) Now start the FCHIDBL.exe file. You should see something like this:

image

15) Click the Open file button

16) Select the *.bin file you saved earlier (the *.bin file contains the firmware)

image

17 ) At this point -> if you are on a laptop make sure your laptop battery is OK or that the laptop is plugged into a AC adapter, so that you don’t risk that your laptop shuts down while you flash the firmware to the Funcube dongle.

18 ) Click WRITE FIRMWARE button. Now click RESET TO APP to get out of boot loader mode (Thanks to Jeff Murri for this tip).

19 ) Close both programs you opened earlier

20 ) Wait 10 secs (just in case)

21 ) Plug out the funcube dongle  (Probably overkill, but hey…)

22 ) Wait 10 secs (to let windows have time to unload the driver. Not sure if this is really necessary. But hey …..)

23 ) Plug in the funcube dongle again

24 ) Congratulations, you have upgraded to the latest firmware !