Hello
I know very little about satellite communication so excuse my simple/stupid questions. I have done some reading and it seems that amateur satellite users work from 140MHz - 2GHz transmit and receive. Mostly voice related transmissions.
http://rsgb.org/main/files/2012/07/satellites_radcom_mar07.pdfI have a couple of questions:
1. What is needed to start out.
I can buy the next two items for very cheap and want to start experimenting.
-I can buy a BIG off axis satellite dish with no feed horn. Size is estimate = about 2m x 1m across the parabola.
-I can buy the feed horns? as seen attached to this post. I have opened one a couple of weeks ago and from what I remember it seems like these feed horns work at ~ 11GHz. I want to mount one on the dish. I assume these units include some sort of local pre-amp which must be fed to another amp inside a radio that does the demodulation.
What else is needed except the obvious radio (including amp and demodulator).
2. What interesting things do people do with satellite comms, specially in the 11GHz band?
- Do they just track satellites for fun and do voice comms?
- can you get science data from NASA satellites?
- Or data relay on public satellites?
Are there cheap radio solutions for 11 GHz?