This episode of HamTalk Live is brought to you
by Tower Electronics. For connectors, cables,
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for more information about ICOM radios. Here
we go, welcome to Good evening, everyone. It's
time for another episode of HamTalk Live. It's
episode number 158. The SatNogs Dashboard recorded
live on Thursday, March 28, 2019. I'm your host,
Neil Rapp, WB9VPG. Thanks for tuning in. To another
episode of HamTalk Live, tonight we're joined
by Corey Shields, KB9JHU, and we'll take your
calls live in just a few minutes. Last week here
on the show, Marty Sulaway, NN1Chicken, and Bryant
Rascal, KG5HVO, were here to talk about Team
Exuberance, the youth contesting team. For the
WPX contest this weekend they're operating from
K3LR and if you missed that show you can listen
anytime at HamTalkLive .com or your favorite
podcast app or YouTube. You can also catch us
on WTWW 5085 AM in a rebroadcast on Saturday
evenings at or about 6 30 p .m. Eastern time.
Well, you know, if you look at your calendar,
you notice that it's about that time when we
get a new sponsor added to the show. And tonight
we'd like to welcome a new sponsor. It's QRM
Labs. And you've always heard that contestors
create their own propagation. Well, here's a
chance to make it happen. We'll be back after
this word from QRM Labs. right here on HamTalk
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QRM Labs is not responsible for accidents that
may occur, not for use near North Korea. It's
amazing how right around April 1st we get a new
sponsor and it's always QRM Labs. How's it new
if it's... Well, never mind. Well, get your questions
ready to go. We'll talk about sat dogs tonight.
If you're listening to us live on Thursday night,
you can give us a call after the interview by
calling 812 -650 -9556. Again, let me give you
that number and we are, we're getting a new phone
number. We're finally getting a... a permanent
phone number again, but we're still on 812 -650
-9556. Again, 812 -650 -9556. So you can call
us on that after a while. You can also tweet
us at HamTalk Live and we'll be checking that
throughout the show and we'll take your questions
with Corey. And we'll do that right after this
word from a real sponsor, ICOM America, right
here on Am Talk Live. D -Star capability built
-in, RF direct sampling on the 2 meter and 70
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10 watts on 1 .2 gigahertz. Visit www .icomamerica
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radios. You're listening to HamTalk Live with
Neil Rapp. Yesterday, my XYL said she'd leave
me if I didn't give up Ham Radio. Over. Thanks
once again to ICOM America for helping bring
you HamTalk live each and every week. Check them
out at icomamerica .com slash amateur. Corey
Shields, KB9JHU, has spent most of his life in
and around Terre Haute and Bloomington, Indiana.
and has been a ham since 1994. He studied computer
science and informatics at Indiana University.
Corey is a manager of system administrators for
Mozilla, the group behind the Firefox web browser.
He has a strong interest in digital communications,
particularly packet, as well as weather spotting,
emergency communications, and contesting. Corey's
with a group called SatNogs. That is an open
source ground station network for satellites.
So, Corey, welcome back to HamTalk Live and thanks
for joining us from the beautiful hills of Brown
County. Thanks a lot, Neil. I appreciate it.
You know, I had to look up our last interview.
It seems like yesterday, but it was 2016, episode
10. I listened to it earlier today and thought,
man, the Sat Nogs project has changed so much
over the last few years and grown so much. I'm
excited to share some of those changes. So thanks
for having me on the show. Yeah, we're up to
158 tonight. So it's been a while. So yeah, let's
catch up a little bit on Sat Nogs. And the big
announcement is this new dashboard that you guys
just announced on January 1. So last time you
were here talking about, you know, the TAP, the
Tapper Forum at Hamvention and SatNogs a little
bit. So before we get into the dashboard, just
remind us what SatNogs is and what SatNogs does.
Yeah, so let me first start off by explaining
the problem that we're trying to tackle and solve.
It's a good problem. You know, access to space
is getting cheaper and cheaper. CubeSats are
an inexpensive form factor of getting a satellite
into space, and launch vehicles are becoming
cheaper as well. So with that, there is... new
CubeSats up in space and up in orbit, and many
of these satellites are, you know, research or
experimental, sent up by a university or a school
or some other organization, and a lot of them
are using amateur radio frequencies and hand
bands. So in previous years, the operators would
get to see the satellite pass over their ground
station a couple times a day and get the telemetry
from the satellites a couple times a day versus
all of the data that's being constantly downlinked
from these satellites and not listened to. So
there are a lot of... amateur radio enthusiasts
and satellite enthusiasts around the world who
chase satellites and collect the data and demodulate
the data and then send that data back up to the
operators and many operators have relied on Hammer
Radio operators for that service. Our goal is
to automate that entire process because having
a ham radio operator set at a computer and do
the Doppler correction for the frequency and
do the decoding and do the uploading and everything
is not going to scale with the growth of the
satellites that are out there. So we've written
software to automate this process. It runs on
a Raspberry Pi and uses cheap SDR dongle like
a RTL SDR. and whatever antennas that a ground
station can provide and it works with a website
that we've also designed to schedule observations
and then collect the data back from your ground
stations. And this has largely been across the
pond and it's really grown since we've talked
last. Yeah, yeah the project started off 2014
and by the Group in the Hacker space in Athens
Greece, so The core team has has been over there
across the pond, but we've we've had contributors
from all over the globe now It's it's amazing
to see We've just found out recently of a group
in South Africa that is working on a ground station
that's going to go into Antarctica. So that's
exciting. It's grown all over the world literally
now. Wow. Well, let's talk a little bit about
this new dashboard. You made this huge release.
It's a really powerful tool for Gathering and
looking at all of this data and seeing what's
going on. So tell us a little bit about this
new dashboard Yeah, so for for the past few years,
you know We've we've been working on all of the
the code and the software to collect the data
And to automate the process of collecting the
data and you know now we're in in our database
We're up to you know, 32 million frames of satellite
data across 173 satellite so we've got now that
we've actually collected data on. So then the
next step is, well, how do we make that data
useful? Well, operators themselves, some operators
have their own dashboards and have their own
ways of making use of telemetry data and we offer
an API where they can get that data directly
from our database. But we wanted to take it a
step further and offer a a decoded database of
data. To get into the nerdy details of this,
we write decoders that then take the demodulated
frames of data from the satellites and decode
them into actual telemetry data. Your battery
voltages, your solar panel voltages, the status
of the experiment that could be on the satellites.
those frames as they're decoded, they get sent
into a time series database as they're gonna
be multiple frames over time so that we can then
query that data across a period of time. So that
may be the end of the last 24 hours or that may
be looking at things over the last 12 months
to see how satellites' parameters have changed.
So we've got all of this into this this database
for the satellites that we have decoders for.
They're not that many today. I think we have
maybe about 18 or 20 satellites that we have
telemetry decoders written for, but we're getting
more and more every month. And so then we've
added a graphing component to this. So if you
go to dashboard .satnogs .org, you can see the
live dashboards for these satellites. And then
We invite the community to reach out to us and
to get an account to this dashboard site and
to basically crowdsource the creation of dashboards
for satellites. And it doesn't have to be a dashboard
for a singular satellite. You could have a dashboard
that spans multiple satellites so you can look
at the differences between a couple of similar
satellites. or look at, let's say, you know,
parameters across all of the Fox satellites,
for instance, or APRS satellites. We have an
APRS satellite monitor in the dashboard as well.
So this has been great. We've had a couple of
satellite operators actually working with us
to build their own dashboards within this system.
So it's... Basically completed the entire process
of of automating the collection of data from
the satellites getting it up into the internet
and actually making that data useful in terms
of graphing Now I'm going out on a limb here.
I should have asked you this before so it may
be a no we can't do that, but I'm just thinking
of examples of this to offer and I'm thinking
of AO -85 because AO -85 has had some difficulties
and it's been shut off for a while and turned
back on and shut off for a while because of some
power and battery issues. Is this something that
you could pull up AO -85 and take a look at the
data and see what's going on with it? Yeah, we
actually do. We've got data for all of the Fox
satellites. in there today. I will say that we
don't have as much data as the FOX2LM is collecting
because they have a lot more ground stations
that are feeding data specifically for the FOX
satellites into the FOX2LM database. But we're
also in conversations with Chris Thompson. manages
the FoxLem software on getting our decoded data
into their dashboard as well so that they can
make the most use out of it. But yeah, we've
got a general, if you go to dashboard .satnox
.org, there is a Fox telemetry dashboard. It's
a work in progress right now, but it's coming
there. And then you can pick the Fox satellite
that you want to look at by its NORAD ID or force
select all of them to compare between them All
right, very good. Well if somebody wants to get
involved with this project either using it or
Contributing to that how can he or she do that?
There are many ways. There are so many aspects
of this project. First and foremost, setting
up a ground station, of course, is one way that
we invite contributors if you've got the capability
of setting up a station with a Raspberry Pi and
an RTL -SDR and maybe a small low noise amplifier
at the antenna, depending on your setup. The
interesting thing, last time we spoke... Three
years ago, the project was focused on directional
antennas and rotators with the assumption that
they would be required for the kind of signal
reception that we were looking to do. Over time,
people have jumped into the network using omnidirectional
antennas and the low noise amplifiers. and set
up ground stations much cheaper that way. And
we found a lot of success in those. So turnstile
antennas, Lindenblad antennas, and the like.
So we've seen a bit of an explosive growth in
the number of ground stations with the... the
addition of omnidirectional antennas. Now, of
course, the directional antennas and the rotators
are still a lot better, but if the listeners
out there are wondering, you know, can I get
into this and set up a ground station for the
cost of, you know, a Raspberry Pi and RTL -SDR
and a, you know, home -built, you know, Lindenblatt
antenna, yeah, definitely. So that's one way
to get involved. Contributions on the code side.
We've got the platform is written in Python and
the client is written in Python. We make use
of GNU Radio with our own custom scripts to do
demodulation of many different modes. And we're
always looking to expand that into more modes
that we don't currently support. So obviously,
SDR programming is a thing that... we could use
contributions with. We could use contributions
in writing decoders for the satellites, their
telemetry for this dashboard. And that uses an
interesting project called KAITI. It's K -A -I
-T -A -I dot I -O, where you write a structure
of the actual, the binary format of that telemetry
packet. and then our software uses that structure
to decode all of the packets that are in the
database. And then there's also just helping
out on our forums and chat channel to answer
questions or helping out with our documentation.
We just recently relaunched our Wiki site with
a much easier to navigate sites, easier to find
content at wiki .satnaugs .org. All of our documentation
is up there. So we're always looking for new
eyes on that documentation where we might have
blind spots because we're so involved with the
project. A new fresh look at our documentation
is always welcome and in an effort to make it
better. So yeah, as far as actually contributing
and getting started. Like I said, the documentation
is on that Wiki site, wiki .satnobs .org. And
we have some contribution documentation up there
that get people started either building a ground
station or building antennas or contributing
to the code or how to get in contact with us.
And our forums are on a... like a messaging board
that we have at community .satinogs .org. So
you can jump into there and introduce yourself
and we'll definitely put you to work. All right.
So some good information there. If you want to
get involved in some way with the satinogs group,
there are some opportunities for you and we'll
talk a little bit more. about some ways that
you can interact with the Sat Nogs group after
this word from Tower Electronics right here on
HamTalk Live. I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm
having an antenna party and I ran out of PL259s.
Oh, come in. Thank you. Would silver plated PL259s
from Tower Electronics be too good for your guests?
Those will be fine. Thank you. You saved my life
the other night. Oh, the PL -259s from Tower
Electronics? Yes, they were very successful at
the antenna party. My antenna works like a charm.
Then how can you ever thank me? I'll try to think
of something. Don't be caught without PL -259s.
Visit Tower Electronics at a ham fest near you
or visit them online anytime at PL -259 .com
or call 920 -435 -2973. They have adapters, cables,
antennas, soldering supplies, and meters too.
Nominations are now open for the amateur radio
news line Bill Pasternak, WA6ITF Young Ham of
the Year Award. I'm Don Wilbanks, AE5DW. Since
1986, we've had the honor of celebrating the
accomplishments of Youth and Ham Radio when we
want to know about your exceptional Young Ham.
You'll find the rules and a nominating form by
clicking the Y -H -O -T -Y tab on ARNewsline
.org. Fill it out, send it in, and we'll see
you and an amazing young ham at the Huntsville
Alabama Ham Fest in August. Thanks and 73 from
Amateur Radio Newsline. Ham Talk Live with Neil
Rapp. Hey baby, I'd love to be in your grid square.
Thanks once again to Tower Electronics for bringing
you the show and they were scheduled to be at
the Sevierville, Tennessee, Hamfest this weekend.
But due to some issues with the trailer that
carries all the stuff, they're not going to be
able to make it after all. So their next planned
trip will be Belton, Texas on April 6th. and
then April 13th, Stoughton, Wisconsin, and Mobile,
Alabama. And you can visit them anytime online
at PL -259 .com. HamTalk Live is on the air every
Thursday night at 9 p .m. Eastern Time right
here at HamTalkLive .com. Be sure to check us
out on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and
Reddit. Whoa, we'll throw Reddit in there tonight.
And real quick, I want to give you an update
on some National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting
events. It's their 75th anniversary and we're
going to have a show on that here in just a couple
of weeks. But Wednesday, April 3rd, at the Midpoint
Library in Westchester, Ohio, museum director
Jack Dominic will be there giving a talk about
the history of the Bethany Relay Station and
the museum. And then on April 9th, This is really
cool. The theater of the mind. Sound effects
during radio's golden age with Mike Martini,
the president of the museum's media heritage
collection. And if you listen to any of those
old radio shows, and sometimes Sunday nights
I'm driving and I hear the When Radio Was show,
and the sound effects just make everything. And
so that's a pretty cool deal. Another one that's
coming up later on in the summer is there's a
radio inside my cell phone. So I like that. That's
a good way to introduce some radio topics to
people that don't realize there's a radio in
your cell phone. So we'll be talking more about
that next month on a special episode of HamTalk
Live and announce the special Hamvention hours
for the museum and an added bonus. It's a surprise.
We're excited to hear about a new tour that's
going to be during Hamvention weekend as well
from the museum. So make sure you tune in for
that. We're on the air every Thursday night at
9 p .m. Eastern Time at HamTalkLive .com and
it's time now for your call. So if you have a
question for Corey, give us a call. That phone
number is 812 -650 -9556. Or you can tweet us,
it's at HamTalk Live. If you're listening to
us on WTWW or on the podcast edition, you won't
be able to reach us because it's Thursday night
right now as we're recording this. And so we're
not there. So if you're listening live, give
us a call, 812 -650 -9556. And while we're waiting
on the calls and tweets, Corey, I know that you're
involved a lot with the booth at Hamvention.
And we've got our Hamvention preview coming up
here in just a few weeks as well. So tell us
a little bit about how people can interact with
Sat Nogs if they are visiting at Hamvention.
Yeah, Hamvenge is always great. We love all the
feedback that we get from visitors there. And
assuming we have the same booth that we haven't
had in the last two years, we'll be right next
to the AMSAT booth, so it'll be easy to find
us that way. Obviously, we'll be showing off
the new dashboard this year and showing how the
data can actually be used and processed. And
we will have the 3D printed rotator as well.
That's always a huge hit. Everyone likes to see
a 3D printed ASL rotator. Unfortunately, everyone
also asks for a kit and we just don't have the
infrastructure to build or sell or support kits
yet. But we'll probably be doing a little bit
more with that as an active ground station assuming
that The weather isn't too windy for a portable
setup. We'll probably set it outside of the building
there by our booth and let it go and see what
kind of data that we collect. And then we can
actually, using the query capabilities of our
dashboards, we can actually build a dashboard
of data specifically collected there at Ham Fetching.
It's going to be cool. Lots of good stuff to
see. We'll also have some more updates on some
of the other LibreSpace foundation projects and
the new SDR maker space that they've just set
up in the last year. So plenty of literature
to pick up, plenty of developers to talk to if
you want to stop by the booth and ask us more
questions about what it's all about or see demos.
We'll be there to show it off. Okay, so a great
opportunity to. to talk with some more of the
developers and people and see some of this stuff
in action at Hamvention. So if you get a chance,
stop by there. And if you have a question, right
now is the time to just give us a call. It's
812 -650 -9556. You don't have to go to Hamvention
to ask your question. You can just pick up the
phone. 812 -650 -9556. Or if your mic is shy,
you can tweet us. At ham talk live on Twitter.
We're watching that and seeing some some fan
mail there, but no questions just yet, so We
we appreciate that and and and I think you were
talking during the the break we probably need
to give a special shout out here because You've
got one of your your team members. That's actually
up listening to this over in Greece Yeah, yeah.
Definitely a shout out to Elkos. He works the
night shift at a sleep study facility. So hopefully
his patients are asleep and he's able to listen
in. But yeah, he's on the Core Dev team over
out of Athens, Greece. I'm sorry to say that
when I did my overnight sleep study, I didn't
sleep. So My suggestion was to put this on speaker.
Let me talk them to sleep and Well, yeah Well,
I don't know that didn't work for me I think
they did finally squeeze four hours out of out
of the night, but It was it was rough So I don't
envy that job. So shout out to you. Hopefully
you're having an easy night and listening here.
Let's talk a little bit and again eight one two
six five zero nine five five six is the number
or tweet us at hem talk live Let's talk, you
know, what's next? What's what's some upcoming
projects that you're looking at? What do you
see in the dashboard expansion on that? What
do you see happening in the next few years? Well,
there's in terms of next steps for for sat nogs
Right now, a lot of the data collection is still
manually scheduled, even though we're scheduling
a couple thousand observations per day. Right
now, we're working on ways of automating that
process. going to have fully automated scheduling.
There are different ways of approaching this
and determining what priorities a ground station
operator might want to use this ground station
for versus new satellites that are launched and
you want that initial telemetry coming out. But
having that fully automated will be the next
step. And you also want to be considerate of
the ground station owners wishes in terms of
how much their ground station is used. Some rotators
are not going to appreciate a 24 by 7 duty cycle.
So that's got to be part of the consideration
as well. On the dashboard and the actual data
that we're collecting, I mean, we've just scratched
the surface by being able to visualize some of
this. I think there's plenty of opportunity for
people to jump in and dig into the data. What
do some of these trends mean? Is there a common
trend in certain? battery configurations or solar
panel configurations or what can we learn from
the life cycle of various satellites that we're
collecting telemetry from. So that's another
opportunity. We have the, like I mentioned a
second ago, the new SDR Maker space. The website
for that is strmaker .space. It's a European
Space Agency funded initiative for improving
and furthering software -defined radio technologies
for space, which is right in our wheelhouse here.
So a lot of different projects there on improving
some new radio code for satellite communications.
even looking into deep neural networks and machine
learning on how can we use artificial intelligence
and machine learning to make better use of some
of this data and get better at decoding some
of the signals that we're getting. So yeah, a
lot of work on the dev side and the software
side of the receivers that we've got. Okay, a
1 2 6 5 0 9 5 5 6 we're gonna wrap things up
shortly. So if you'd like to call in Now is the
time to do so you sent me some statistics before
the show tonight and one of the one of the graphs
that I'm looking at here is the network cumulative
observations and in fourth quarter of 2017, you're
down, you know, in the probably 10 to 20 ,000
range and then we're looking at now and you're
pushing 500 ,000. Yeah, that's and like I said,
the growth has been explosive. I was looking
at the stations creation date in our database
and the last time we had this interview in 2016
we had four stations in our production network
and today we're well over 500. Not all of them
are online all the time and some of them are
future planned stations. I'm looking right now
at about 170 that are that are online and active
at this moment. So yeah, it's it's grown a lot
since then and The network that we have with
those ground stations I should also add that's
just one way of contributing data into our pipeline
We also work with third party software developers
who who have decoders for satellites and we get
much more data from them coming into our database
as well. So, DK3WN has a whole suite of satellite
decoder apps for Windows that a lot of people
will use, and those can forward data into our
database. And GR Satellites, which is a good
new radio module, will do the same as well. So
we've got multiple streams of data coming into
the database. And that database is up to about
32 million frames currently. So yeah, a lot of
growth. It's been great. Yeah, it really looks
explosive. And it's credit to the team of...
you know sticking with it and putting together
some some good good software and Getting the
word out and getting out there to you know, things
like hamvention and and some of these other uh
venues around the world and yeah and getting
the word out Yeah, I I think i'll credit the
the growth to to uh Two big things one one was
that we Instead of installing the software by
hand and having to go through, you know a whole
uh wiki page of steps to get the software working.
We now have a Raspberry Pi image that is generated
with all the software on there. So you just burn
the Raspberry Pi image as you would any other
image and pop it into the Raspberry Pi. Log in
and run a command to to set up the the satin
aux client So we made a much easier for the ground
station operators to actually get started that
and and the The the trial and success of omnidirectional
antennas has really lowered the barrier for a
lot of people. So yeah, definitely If you're
thinking about trying it out and you've got spare
Raspberry Pi sitting around a spare antenna grab
our client and sign up on our network website
and get started. Now, I have to end with this
story. We're just about done here, but I have
to end with a story. You're talking about the
ease of omnidirectional antennas. You know what
I'm going to talk about. We're at a club function.
I'm trying to show some people how to work some
of the Fox satellites, and I'm sitting in my
car with the whip on the back, you know, an omnidirectional
antenna, and I think I had the arrow with me,
but you're out running around with your arrow,
pointing it everywhere, you know, at all these
satellites, and all of a sudden you hear WB9BPG.
And I started looking for you. I'm like, where's
he pointing his arrow? No, you were in your car.
Yeah, I didn't even have the arrow out. And he's
like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. He's here.
He's right here. I just saw him a minute ago.
And yeah, I've had a lot of luck with the Fox
satellites just using an omnidirectional antenna.
This summer I'm gonna try to get that arrow and
I'm gonna you know out and and use it more but
I made some early attempts with it and it worked
but It's just so much easier to do the omnidirectional
that and it's kind of locked me into AO 91 and
92 that's the the downside is it it locks me
into those but But hopefully this summer we can
start doing that but it works Yeah, yeah, no,
the on these do work We we do recommend a low
noise amplifier on it and you can get those on
eBay for 20 bucks But it makes a world of difference
or you can go the the total opposite in in the
spectrum and we have had a couple occasions where
One of our users has set up a satin aux client
on the and I'm gonna botch this up on the dwingaloo
radio observatory and I mean, we were able to,
or they were able to decode perfect signals from
horizon to horizon on a two -degree pass. It's
crazy. But we've got a post about that in our
community site, community .satanogs .org. You
can see. Pictures I think there's even a YouTube
video of them running sat nogs on the this massive
radio observatory What's the I'm trying to look
it up. Yeah, it's a 25 meter dish Wow Sat nogs
on a 25 meter dish or an omnidirectional antenna.
Yeah, we'll do it all. Yeah, there you go Well,
we've we've got a call on the line. So let's
take the call here Welcome to ham talk live NCW
thanks for having me up so tonight It's in for
DCW and I have to say it I got it right I didn't
do CDW Because I did that on the logbook of the
world when I went and did my little expedition
over spring break I got I got it backwards so
in for DCW. Thanks for for calling in. What's
your question? Yeah, I just want to say, number
one, thanks to Corey for saving my bacon. A couple
of times when my voice recorder didn't work out,
I could go on and get the files or audio files
because I missed. So related to that, and this
is my question, is I'm outside pointing my arrow
in the sky and recording them, and I just got
them in a file on my computer. Is there a need
for audio files like that from the FM satellites
for your database? We don't currently have a
way of like uploading them That that you would
have saved locally I think there's there's always
a deed there. I mean obviously, you know when
Someone like yourself has made a quick contact
and not being able to record it. It's great to
have it recorded somewhere So yeah, that's that's
always been been great and the for us and and
AMSAT as well. The side benefit of the FOX satellites
is that if we're always using the data under
voice decoder, we're going to get the added benefit
of extracting telemetry from that observation,
as well as the FM voice. But no, we don't have
a way of being able to upload something like
that yet. There have been discussions about changing
the entire design of the network client relationship
especially when it comes to The concept of auto
scheduling, you know, maybe the the network just
needs to accept Submissions from clients or users
in this case arbitrarily rather than the network
actually scheduling things out. So it may come
in the future, it's just not there today. But
yeah, I'm glad we were able to have an observation
there for your QSO, that's great. Yeah, no, thanks
so much, I appreciate it. Neil, thanks for having
the show, learned a lot, and y 'all keep going.
All right, thanks for calling in. Y 'all have
a good night. All right, you too. All right,
thanks for for giving us calling for DCW Well,
that's gonna finish things up here Cory. So any
last comments before you go? No, thanks for having
me again. I you know, we'll do this again in
another three years and Or sooner We'll see how
much further this has gone from there. But it's
a great project. The development team is a lot
of fun to work with. The satellite enthusiasts,
I mean, we're all just really excited about space,
really excited about satellites. So it's a great
community to be a part of, even if you can't
get a ground station on the air. We've got a
lot of people who are involved in our forums,
maybe in an apartment. can't do a ground station,
that's fine. Just get involved and say hi. We're
all enthusiasts here. Bill's on the chat here,
says my vertical used to work okay until I finally
built a turnstile. So yeah styles are I I've
seen a lot of success with the The the turnstiles
so and they're they're easy to build So we've
seen a lot of those there's a bit of a modified
turnstile. I've seen coming from a company in
Europe that's got a like a 45 degree bent top
to it But then turnstile base and that's been
a really successful antenna as well. I know that
there's one up on top of the Chabot Space and
Science Center in Oakland, California. And they
have a sat -nog station there as well as a sat
-nog exhibit as part of their mission control
exhibit. So it's been fun to be a part of that,
too. Oh, very good. That's very cool and exciting.
And lots more to come, so we'll be... tuned in
and and watch for that and I will we'll see you
at Dayton if not before Down the street or something
But thanks for coming on the show and updating
us on everything and We'll do it again Thanks
a lot Neil. Thanks for happening. Appreciate
it All right, that is a wrap for this week's
ham talk live. Thanks to Corey Shields KB9JHU
and everyone out there in cyberspace for listening
and calling in. And you're invited back next
Thursday night at 9 p .m. Eastern Time. And for
a list of all of our upcoming guests, just go
over to HamTalkLive .com. And if you like HamTalk
Live, please consider leaving us a review on
iTunes. That helps others find us faster. So
for now, this is Neil Rapp, WB9VPG, saying seven
three, seven five, And may the good DX be yours.
And maybe that rocket will help. The end. Thank
you.