Satellite Fishing in Linz – September 2015

Saturday September 12 2015 at the glider club Union Linz‘ air field.  A nice day despite the clouds that covered the sky in the morning.  Three of the MURSAT team start to set up the equipment to fish for satellite signals.

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Setting up the fishing gear

We were invited to take part at “Beyond the field” which was part of the “(K)ein Festival Kollaboration”.  The local organizers provided food and drinks and the glider club took interested people for short flights in their planes.  A perfect surrounding to go fishing for satellites.

Our equipment still seems to be far from perfect since we did not get lot’s of signals from satellites.  But our last attempt finally worked and we even gathered some useful data from one of the NOAA birds that constantly transmit pictures of our planet’s surface.

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Satellite Performance by Reni and Norbert

But maybe it’s not technical error that prevented us from catching more satellites at this particular day.  We could not resist the offer to hitch a ride on a glider and spend way too much time waiting in line for a first short flight.

Later in the afternoon another member of the team showed up as we packed the fishing gear.  We started preparations for the performance by Reni and Norbert.  Both used satellite data in various forms to wonderfully wrap up this exciting day.  As the sun set behind the industrial sky line, glider pilots, satellite fishers and everyone else stood listening to the strange sounds from outer space.

 

 

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Hall im All – Satelite Fishing in Tirol 25.7.2014

It has been a while since we did that, and now Kulturlabor Stromboli, a cultural center in Hall in Tirol, a small town close to Innsbruck, has Space as its celebration topic – and of course we join!

This time, it is Reni Hofmüller and Norbert Math, who get together and set up a fishing environment in Hall; for the first time we do it at dusk into the night, and hopefully will not only hear, but this time also see some satelites!

Want to come? You find details here ->
Kulturlabor Stromboli

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Project Repository moved to GIT

Hi,

I just moved the subversion based project repository to GIT. For public access there is a gitweb which can be reached via: http://git.spreadspace.org/?p=mur.sat.git

You may also clone the repository via GIT protocol using the following command. (Note: this only gives you read-only access)

git clone git://git.spreadspace.org/mur.sat.git

regards, christian

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mursat visiting servus at in Linz 20.11.2013

We are happy to be guests in the series corenighthikes on the 20th of November in Linz to talk about the history and current state of our bleoved satellite. Join us there!

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Microwave Festival Hongkong November 2013

Jogi and I visited Taipei and Hongkong in 2012, and met Ellen Pau, a media artist, founder of Videotage and a central figure in the support for art in this reagion of the world.
During this visit to Hongkong in 2012, Jogi and I gave a satellite fishing workshop, each time an amazingly personal and intensive encounter with our understanding of technology and impact, a direct body connection can have.

The visit in 2012 made quite an impression on some of the people in Hongkong, which led to the invitation to participate in the 2013 edition of the Microwave Festival.

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Things About Orbits

Whenever we present the satellite, a lot of questions regarding orbits, speed of orbital bodies and these things arise.  XKCD has nice answers to some of these questions in one of his recent articles of his what if? series.

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Satellite Fishing At Kleylehof

satellite fishing preparations

Preparing the satellite fishing workshop at Kleylehof/Nickelsdorf

This year we were invited to give a workshop at the annual reheat festival organized by klingt.org at Kleylehof/Nickelsdorf.  The topic was satellite fishing and that’s what we did.

We brought our mobile equipment consisting of two laptop computers, a funcube dongle and a handheld antenna.  Softwarewise we stick to qthid for tuning the dongle and quisk to decode the signals.

We were unlucky in getting beacons from various amateur radio satellites (and the ISS) this day.  But when the NOAAs started to arrive we got some pretty good readings from their APT transmitters.  And this time we did manage to decode a data stream and got our first image from NOAA 15, decoded by using the free version of wxtoimg.

NOAA 15 image

First image from NOAA 15 weather satellite

Thanks to OZ9AEC’s blog we finally managed to feed a correctly formated sound file to wxtoimg and got rewarded by the image above.  Since nobody cares to mention the basic facts I do it here:  set your decoder to AM and try to get a clear signal.  Then follow OZ9AEC’s instructions on howto prepare the sound file before feeding it to wxtoimg.

It was great fun to be at reheat!  Once you manage to find Kleylehof you just let go and enjoy the spot.  The klingt.org people are super friendly and the festival is a cool place to be.  Despite the occasional drizzle and falling temperatures it was nice to be outside all of the time and see all the different performances and installations.  Go to the reheat 2013 image gallery for an impression and be sure to save the date for next year!

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mursat goes Dresden – a workshop and concert visit at geh8

caelum

“donnerstag” is a series of workshops, lectures, performances and concerts at Konzertkeller des riesa efau in Dresden. Every first and third thursday a group of non-professionals and professionals meet, discuss, listen …

Jogi Hofmueller, Peter Venus and Marian Weger visit and present mur.sat and IN_CAELUM, will talk about news and widen the possible ground station grid for mursat, once it will be travelling.

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AIRFLOW presented during YURIJ’s Night in ESC, April 12th 2013

The flight of a weatherballoon, used to trigger imagination by musicians and composers.
Come see at ESC im LABOR, Jakoministrasse 16 and talk with people from the team about news and possibilities to join the development!

Friday, 12.4.2013, starting at 8pm.

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Worklab X Sat, 27th – Mon, 29th of April – mobile satellite tracking station

Hey!

We have had this idea for a long time already – that it would be nice to go out and have a good compact satellite tracking and listening possibility. Our favorite in this is a bicycle-trailer, a box with 2 wheels to adjoin it to a normal bike.
We will look into antennas and also into energy harvesting, to make it light, easy to use and fun to experiment with.

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