[Ground-station] Ballon launch - lightweight inexpensive 10GHz transmit

[Michelle Thompson]

For the balloon launch opportunity, and for groundsat in general, we have
been asked to consider a lightweight inexpensive 10GHz transmitter for the
balloon. And, obviously, receivers on the ground.

Phil and the high school team doing the launches are interested in live
video from the balloon. Launch schedule is flexible and it's an ongoing
project.

Kit bash something from DirectTV? I think Kerry and Drew got something
working that way.

Existing card or dongle?

Design a board? We are capable.

Effort invested improves groundsat side.

We have a good handle on inexpensive 10GHz receive hardware. Deploying
enough of it? That's going to be hard. How hard? We need to run the numbers
for a variety of powers to find out how bad. We aren't going to get
continuous coverage without seriously taking over the world. But, we can
figure out what coverage looks like with a variety of configurations.

(If we could just have a little telemetry app running on everyone's
satellite TV dish/receiver, then we'd have a nice fat fence at least.
DirecTV has not yet returned my call about this...)

People of Twittertopia say DirecTV LNBs as phased arrays set up to wedge
out likely high altitude paths. So I looked at phasing up DirecTV LNBs, to
shape the beam a bit. You know it might actually work. Anyone done this
already or know of a paper? Beamwidth of the LNB by itself is about 40
degrees.

Let's hear your video transmitter ideas and leads for this use case. It
will be fun for everyone and a big learning opportunity and we might find
(or forge) a really good path forward.

Since the "infiltrate all DirecTV receiver installations across the US for
amateur radio botnet" plan is probably not going to work out any time soon,
we need to come up with buildable repeatable recipes and get them up and
running.

After Hamvention I'll publish everything we have about getting an
LNB+PLL/bias-T/rtlsdr/odroid/VPN station deployed. Cost is not bad at all
and it's very light weight and portable. Maybe we can make a kit.

Another area for this receiver is to improve performance by alignment to a
fixed synthesized tone. Hardware is figured out for that but the correction
isn't tested yet.

There's got to be other solutions or ideas out there in various
communities. If you are part of one of them then please share this so we
can learn.

More soon!
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