Part 3 of our work cycle in Montreal is a field trip to Mont Royal, the hill in the center of town.
montroyal satellite fishing
We are lucky with the weather, it has been raining quite often, and that would make a trip outside really unpleasant. I really like going out of the “usual” festival surroundings like stages or conference rooms. First, one needs to bring all necessary equipment, including food and drinks. An of course antennas.
satellite fishing with antenna
It was nice to be there at “Belvedere”, seeing the city with a bit of distance and by being there, also sharing ideas and information with other people who just went there to enjoy the view.
The satellites we are looking for are mostly either amateur radio satellites like HO-68 or university projects like BEESAT or ITUpSAT1 from Istanbul Teknik Universitesi; we had prepared a good list the evening before with Gpredict.
And of course, during waiting for the appearance on “our” sky, ideas come up, like building listening hats to rest the antenna on.
satellite antenna hat
During the periods of preparing for the next one, there is always time to exchange, like discussing: what is perception, approaching the whole fishing process as something fenomenological, driven by intution rather than by so-called pure scientific information. And of course, we pass on more information about TLEs (the position data from satellites, as we can get them from celestrak.com (from NORAD), as they are used in Gpredict and also in the sonification module with python, that Jogi had written for his installation Coallision, and which is also being used for in caelum from Peter Venus and Marian Weger and will be the content of the second workshop day, on saturday June 2nd.
