antenna – Oleg Kutkov personal blog

Connecting external GPS antenna to the Starlink terminal

Oleg Kutkov — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 00:27:48 +0000

In this article, I would like to discuss Starlink GPS implementation, potential problems, and ways to improve. Let’s agree that the paper will focus on GNSS in general, but for convenience, I will call it GPS. But first… Why does Starlink need GPS? To successfully communicate with satellites, the Starlink terminal requires the position of each satellite with the…

Continue Reading→

Small satellite dish with rotator

Oleg Kutkov — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 00:13:15 +0000

Receiving and analyzing radio signals is fun. Receiving satellite signal is even better. A few years ago, I had a nice 3m satellite dish with a hydrogen line receiver. Now I have only a small balcony with limited antennas placement ability. I decided to build a custom 40 cm dish with a servo-based rotator. Sure, it’s impossible to receive weak…

Continue Reading→

Satellite LNB controller with GUI interface

Oleg Kutkov — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:54:15 +0000

Satellite LNB are quite cheap and easy to get devices. There are different models for different bands (C, Ku, and Ka) with different characteristics like SNR, noise figure, etc. Typically those devices are used with TV Set-top boxes. More interesting is that LNB can be easily connected to an SDR receiver. LNB is a simple frequency down-converter with an output…

Continue Reading→

Mysterious Flat satellite antenna from China

Oleg Kutkov — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:41:00 +0000

A few months ago, I found a quite unusual satellite antenna on the well-known Chinese portal. The antenna was relatively small, completely flat, and declared as a Ku-band satellite TV antenna. I was really wondered what’s inside and how it works so I decided to buy one sample. In a few weeks, I got a shabby box containing an actual…

Continue Reading→

Reworking linear polarization satellite LNB into a circular polarized

Oleg Kutkov — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 20:56:08 +0000

In this article, I want to discuss different types of satellite LNB, polarization, and depolarization of waves. Also, I’ll show how to rework the LNB. Also, we will discuss a theory to figure out why this rework is working. The primary topic here is Ku-band LNB, but all this also works for the Ka-band and C-band. Here in Europe, we…

Continue Reading→

Combining two HackRF SDR to see more

Oleg Kutkov — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 20:28:46 +0000

HackRF One is a popular SDR transceiver and a really nice piece of hardware. For a reasonable price, you can get fully open hardware to monitor radio signals in a wide range (20MHz – 6GHz, but really up to 7GHz). Boards support external clocking and can be easily customized. I believe there is only one concern about this board is…

Continue Reading→

Dish antenna for the amateur radioastronomy

Oleg Kutkov — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 22:44:25 +0000

In the previous article, I describe a low noise amplifier for the 21cm band. Today I want to show you a construction of the dish antenna where this amplifier was used. Most optimal, efficient, and easy to build is a classic dish antenna that consists of an actual dish that acts like a mirror and some receiver at the focal…

Continue Reading→

Low noise and low cost amplifier for radio astronomy, 21 cm band

Oleg Kutkov — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 11:59:02 +0000

21 cm band, also known as the Hydrogen line, is one of the important bands in radio astronomy. Please read this Wikipedia article if you not familiar with the Hydrogen line. Nowadays, even radio amateurs can observe this signal from outer space, thanks to modern hardware. One of the most important parts of any receiver is the antenna and input…

Continue Reading→

Listening to aircrafts and receiving images from the satellites

Oleg Kutkov — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 17:04:13 +0000

In the previous article, we discussed how to calculate and build a simple Yagi-Uda antenna. Now it’s time to play with this antenna and receive some interesting signals. This will be mostly video post. I filmed all experiments and created brief videos. Hope they gonna be interesting, video is in Russian, but English subtitles are also available. As the receiver,…

Continue Reading→

144 MHz Yagi-Uda antenna

Oleg Kutkov — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 15:47:27 +0000

Yagi–Uda antenna is a directional and pretty effective antenna consisting of multiple parallel elements in a line, usually half-wave dipoles made of metal rods. The Best-known use of this type of antenna is as rooftop terrestrial television antennas, but it is also used for point-to-point fixed communication links and long-distance shortwave communication by shortwave broadcasting stations and radio amateurs. This…

Continue Reading→