Starlink beacons

[David Lonard]

It is pretty preliminary, but I thought I would show some observations of Starlink beacon signals at 11.325 GHz. I used a pair of Othernet LNBs modified to accept a common 25 MHz reference signal and pointed the lnbs down towards the horizon. Lots of Starlink beacons can be seen. I've posted the correlated power spectrograms with a 2 MHz bandwidth over a 5 meter baseline.

I'm hoping that when some storms move in, that the Starlink beacons can scan through the atomsphere to probe rain cloud related scattering.

Stay tuned...

David

[Jim Sky]

David, did you process the combined signal in a SDR? And how were they combined?

Jim

[David Lonard]

Jim,

I used a XTRX SDR that has two phase-coherent channels. A USRP or LimeSDR could also be used in the same way. Additional requirements are that the LNBs are modified to accept a common 25 MHz reference.

While I haven't tried one, I think that a KrakenSDR should work well also since only ~ 2 MHz of bandwidth is needed to capture all the Doppler shift from the narrow band beacons. 

I'm looking for signs of Doppler scattering from the carriers that might occur from rain scatter. I think it should be possible to detect forward scattering from aircraft too. 

David

[David Lonard]

I hooked up my two lnbs to a pair of 80 cm dishes to get a more focused look at the Starlink beacons. This isolates single Starlink satellites so that I don't see a jumble of beacons all at once. The S/N is obviously stronger also.