L-Band satellite signals on 1544.5MHz

I've received what I think may well be signals from some SARSAT satellites on 1544.5MHz over the last few hours.  I wasn't expecting the one in the screen shots, so its not from any of the birds I'm tracking with gpredict.

Now that's what I call ...

... a lot of CW!

More buttons in gr-kx3.

A little progress in gr-kx3.  Still bugs though.

RXAMADRM but no pics yet.

I heard some DRM activity on 40m this morning and decided to give RXAMADRM a whiz.  I got it working with my Signalink-USB attached to my KX3.  In order to see signals at all in the waterfall display, I needed to crank the KX3's audio level up to 40 (max) and set the Rx audio level on the Signalink to max too.

RXAMADRM was able to decode fair bit of data over an hour or so, but never enough to print images.  I really need a decent antenna for HF.  And less noise.

A better bodge for Hamlib and the KX3

I bit the bullet and dist-upgraded to Ubuntu 12.10.  In doing so the previous hamlib package bodge for increased timeouts with the KX3 was discarded as the hamlib package from the repos upgraded.

I figured that a more elegant bodge was probably acheivable having proven the nature of the fix.  I discovered that I could localise the change to the Elecraft backend.  This is the change that I made.

--- hamlib-1.2.15.2.orig/kenwood/k3.c
+++ hamlib-1.2.15.2/kenwood/k3.c
@@ -108,7 +108,7 @@ const struct rig_caps k3_caps = {
     .serial_handshake =    RIG_HANDSHAKE_NONE,
     .write_delay =        0,    /* Timing between bytes */
     .post_write_delay =    100,    /* Timing between command strings */
-    .timeout =        600,    /* FA and FB make take up to 500 ms on band change */
+    .timeout =        3*600,    /* FA and FB make take up to 500 ms on band change */
     .retry =        3,

     .has_get_func =        K3_FUNC_ALL,

I also bumped the package version so that it wouldn't get replaced by the update manager.

I found that I had to build the package with:

 dpkg-buildpackage -b