American satellite started transmitting again after being abandoned in 1967

csirac2 10 years ago |

Here's a recording of what it transmits (just a carrier, probably modulated by voltage fluctuations from the solar panels as it tumbles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxqwZ42NyLw

Johnny555 10 years ago | |

Interestingly, the article says that the signal was picked up by an amateur in North Cornwall (in the UK?) in 2013, but the video you linked to was posted in 2012 by a ham from Brazil.

petecooper 10 years ago | | |

>(in the UK?)

Correct. I live near Bude, north Cornwall, UK and can confirm this.

Local attractions include GCHQ Bude[1], TAT-3[2], TAT-14[3], CANTAT-1[4], Apollo[5], TAT-8[6], AC-2[7], EIG[8] and GLO-1[9].

Unrelated but relevant: Henry Bottinger, former AT&T big cheese and author of possibly the finest book I've read on getting your point across to an audience[10], lives a few hundred metres up the road from me. Nice guy, too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCHQ_Bude

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-3

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-14

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANTAT-1

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_(submarine_communicatio...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-8

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC-2_(cable_system)

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIG_(cable_system)

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLO-1_(cable_system)

[10] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moving-Mountains-Letting-Others-Thin...

zatkin 10 years ago | | |

Did you mean "Henry M. Boettinger"? http://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2011/2/14/AT&T-Arc...

petecooper 10 years ago | | |

Yes, that's him. We occasionally chat about mundane things at the local store. Alzheimer's disease hasn't been kind, so he needs some friendly help and assistance from time to time.

zatkin 10 years ago | | |

That's so sad, sorry to hear about that. :(

bpye 10 years ago | | |

Still seems strange to see somewhere so close to home mentioned here. Always feels like the middle of nowhere when I'm in the area.

philiphodgen 10 years ago | | |

Book ordered. Thanks for the suggestion. Out of print, so a second hand copy off Amazon had to suffice.

petecooper 10 years ago | | |

Happy to help. There was a period from ~2003-2008 when I was looking for _any_ copy of the book, 'new' copies were absurdly expensive and even the well-used versions were upwards of 40USD. Then I moved to Cornwall, met the guy and he gave me a copy from his stash.

mstade 10 years ago | |

That's a great combination of visualizations, looks kind of like a waterfall.

LesZedCB 10 years ago | | |

That's what it's called[1] :)

http://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/889/what-is-a-waterfa...

mstade 10 years ago | | |

Cool, I learned something – thank you! :o)

dstyrb 10 years ago |

I, for one, am glad they split that article into two pages; I was getting a bit intimidated by the length.

hackbinary 10 years ago | |

I didn't even notice that it was split into two pages.

I also appreciated that they left out the detail on what the intended purpose for Les 1 and Les 2 was, so they wouldn't confuse anyone with too much information.

http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/les-1.htm

iraphael 10 years ago | |

I also appreciated the fact that they overrode the browser's default scrolling to a less natural speed, and in doing so, also prevented me from being able to use gestures to return to hacker news.

jimhefferon 10 years ago | |

Yes, I often I judge the journalistic source by the links to other articles. Here, I judge that the source is very interested in the word "dirty". That makes a ham radio article all the more .. unexpected.

hoinz 10 years ago | |

lol, but then I realized.. maybe it's done on purpose to validate an article's appeal.

Sir_Cmpwn 10 years ago | | |

It's done on purpose to get more ads to your eyeballs.

ohitsdom 10 years ago | | |

Which is silly since the same ads show on both pages. But I guess the site can charge twice...

hmottestad 10 years ago |

This site uses "smooth scrolling" which tries to mimic how scrolling on macs work and subsequently breaking scrolling on mac.

iSnow 10 years ago | |

What's extremely infuriating is that I disable smooth scrolling where possible only to get it shoved down my throat by various sites. Which web designer comes to the conclusion that overriding a platform-wide choice is a great idea?

That ranted, on Firefox/Windows it scrolls normally.

hrrsn 10 years ago | | |

I didn't notice it in Safari on OS X (it scrolled fine), but scrolling with Chrome on OS X is terrible.

sixothree 10 years ago | |

Also the "related content" is pretty much not worksafe.

asadhaider 10 years ago | |

Scrolls fine for me in Firefox on Mac, that is after I allowed the site on NoScript.

yAnonymous 10 years ago | |

Scrolls like every other site for me, but if it's broken on Macs, that's nice.

bencollier49 10 years ago |

High quality web-site there plastered with borderline-NSFW social links. Nice.

parennoob 10 years ago | |

Another great reason to run an ad blocker. My webpage looked pretty clean, no "social" links.

csirac2 10 years ago | | |

Ouch; I also run ad blockerd, or I might've tried to find a more reasonable page to post (turns out there's a decent blog post with basically the same information).

miah_ 10 years ago |

I found a blog by Andrew Garrott (M0NRD) describing their experience monitoring the signal, also has a recording.

http://nerdsville.blogspot.com/2013/03/receiving-les1-satell...

jpmattia 10 years ago |

Some detail about the Lincoln Experimental Satellites here: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/SP-4217/ch8.htm

raddad 10 years ago |

http://starringthecomputer.com/snapshots/independence_day_po...

DrScump 10 years ago |

Changeling? Uh oh.

illumen 10 years ago |

Everyone who worked on that space junk is dead?