Catch as Catch Can on a Slow News Sunday

While we had a SpaceX Starlink launch this evening at 7:05 PM (long video - but you can scroll around in it if you want), it has been a "slow news day" at all the sources I go to most often to see what's going on.  There have been a couple of stories I've tried to get actual details on, beyond headlines, but haven't found out if there's anything real to the YouTube headlines yet. One example is that apparently the rest of the world is starting to find out about Voyager 1's problems and is spreading the news.

YouTube headlines are too often like the one I got in my "chosen for you" selections during the week. I really should have saved a screen capture.  The title was something about NASA reveals something they found on Mars, and the picture to tease the video was a background that could well have been Mars, but plopped into the photo somehow was a very obvious car, truck or maybe even large boat engine that I swear I'd seen before.  Think of something like a straight six cylinder engine, only not painted, just looking like unfinished metal.  I guarantee that's click bait and NASA found nothing of the sort on Mars.

The various sources are all still reporting Starship IFT-3 this Thursday, but NextSpacelight shows the time NET 8:00 AM ET which is 7:00 AM CDT.  I maintain my expectation that they're not going to launch that far before sunrise, which ought to be around 7:40 AM out there. There have been major changes to this flight as if they're expecting to make their suborbital flight and want to test several things while they're in the microgravity.  The biggest change seems to be instead of going almost once around the world and splashing Starship near Hawaii, this one is going to end in the Indian Ocean.  Maybe they'll find that MH370. 

My big ham project has proceeded and while progress has been made, I'm still not done.  I've found some things that I'm looking at changing already.  The SDRConsole software is running fine, it's allowing me to monitor more than I comfortably can with the station transceiver itself.  The next big step I'm working toward is having the digital sub-bands I've defined drive the software used to demodulate those signals, so if (when) I see things in those bands I can turn on the demodulation software tell if I want to change over to a different sub-band.  The rest is getting used to the whole setup and finding optimum settings for everything, which has a large element of personal preference to it.  

This is the hardware block diagram as it's put together.  

In the handful of boxes on the middle of the right side, there's a little box with LNA written on it (Low Noise Amplifier) that's there to set the system's noise figure so that it isn't ruined after going through the Splitter just below it.  I've discovered that the LNA kit I chose and built is fine in the band it's designed for (50-54 MHz or six meters), but seems to actually have substantial loss in the HF ham bands.  By jumpering the LNA out (just connecting the IN and OUT cables) signals improved substantially on the low bands - I mean like maybe 20 to 30 dB better.

Since the company made no claims about the LNA's performance down at lower frequencies, I wrote them to see what I should expect. If it's just not going to work well, I could replace it with something different or find a way to maybe just switch it out.