Picking Up Russian Birds By Pointing Dish North?

[Davage]

Lately I've been doing a lot of reading of Bob Cooper's books. The books are all about the pioneering days in the C-Band industry, and some of the really cool things that the guys did back then while experimenting with satellite technology. One of the things that they did was to point a C-Band dish towards the north pole to pick up signals coming from some of the Russian birds, because the Russian birds' weren't in the Clarke Belt, they were in some sort of other polar or non-standard orbit. the signals would spill over the top of the earth and spill down into North America.

Has anybody done any experimenting at pointing their dish at birds that aren't in the Clarke Belt? Does anybody use non-standard orbits anymore, or has everybone settled on parking their birds in geostationary orbit?

Just curious

 

[Anole]

I was looking up something else last night, and ran across this reference to the Molniya orbit.
Not exactly something that comes up in conversation every day.

 

[Hermitman]

There are loads of satellites not in a geostationary orbit. They cover communications, navigation, amateur radio, weather and reconnaissance. For these satellites, you'll need a dish or antenna that can track or receive a moving satellite.

 

[truckracer]

Have any of you ever found a video or audio feed on a non-geosync bird?

 

[caddata]

If I remember correctly, from the "early days", the Russian video standard used a special videosync rate that caused them to appear to be scrambled to a USA (NTSC) standard receiver.

 

[Steveo]

Have any of you ever found a video or audio feed on a non-geosync bird?

Locked a few inclinded orbit sats in my time, mostly Russian but never any low earth orbit or anything racing across the sky.

BTW. truckracer, I like you car, good Aussie muscle car but only better :up

 

[N5XZS]

Caddata,

Back in the cold wars days they just use SECAM video format in 576i lines 25 frames per Seconds, there is no scrambled tramsission since is state owned TV broadcasts at that time.

There is other rare video satellite broadcast feed to USSR Navies fleets on 700 MHz on GEO, orbit and use analog FM Videos.

I think they don't use that any more other then the polar orbit is still in use for people living north of Artic Circle.

 

[mikekohl]

Molniya is no longer in use.
I installed and modified a 12 foot Paraclipse for east/west as well as
vertical up and down movement to follow this satellite at an installation
in Anchorage back in 1986. It was analog Secam back then---which was
quite a challenge. Nowadays we are spoiled by automatic standards conversion
built in to sub-100 dollar MPEG-2 digital receivers. Back then, you needed either
a multistandards monitor or a standards converter. And then there was the
constant fine tuning to follow the satellite every few minutes.

A bunch of geosynchronous high powered C-band satellites at 140 East,
90 East, and other orbital positions provide Russian television to all locations
in the country. You can "see" a satellite due south of you up to a latitude of
81 degrees North, so all populated areas can be served by "normal" C-band.

3675 MHz transponder on some of these birds puts out an EIRP of +44 or better, so it is no challenge at all to pick up the signals on a small (4 foot or less) dish,
and I saw zero difference in signal received after removing a dielectric plate
from an LNBF despite the circular signal received, on an installation in eastern
Siberia (Chukotka) last winter.

 

[Davage]

Hi Mike,

I read through some of your adventures in Coop's book, as well as here on satelliteguys. It is nice to hear that the cable industry didn't put all of the C-Band guys out of business.

I wasn't sure if the Russian stuff was still sneaking over the north pole or not. I figure that Iceberg would have been up to the challenge of pointing a dish north if there was anything to find 2 weeks from now I'm putting up a C-Band system after an absense. I'm very much looking forward to pulling in signals from the 3 to 4 Ghz range..

 

[Gilgamesh]

I remember Molniya, I never tried getting that sat. there was another russian satellite also with another name, dont recall name ATM, what made the russian satellites weird was their figure 8 type orbit, the satellite would receive a few hours of programming and record it, then once it was way out over the north pole, it would re-broadcast to those near the arctic circle, allowing folks like Borat to get the daily news with their homemade antennas no doubt.