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From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics,sci.misc
Subject: Re: Satellite DX
Message-ID: <633@neoucom.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 23-Jul-87 10:07:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: neoucom.633
Posted: Thu Jul 23 10:07:20 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Jul-87 16:37:16 EDT
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Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
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Xref: mnetor sci.electronics:1052 sci.misc:397


I used to work on satellite transponder equipment.  Probably all
spy satellite stuff is encrypted to the point where is not worth
the effort it takes to get the stuff back.  If memory seves me
right, the military uses ~14 GHz downlinks (get a copy of MSN
magazine for details).  Some are as high as 25 GHz (ugh!!).

Russian spy satellies are designed for a duty cycle of ~6 months.
They send film canisters back for reentry!  No problems with radio
security there.  There are some Soviet spy satellites that do use
video, though so I've heard.

The Russian TV satellites are in two formats.  One is called
Gorizont (their word for horizontal) and is in synchronous orbit
over Europe; this isn't viewable from the US.  They have satellites
called Molnyia (thier word for lightning) taht are in eliptical
orbit.  These can be seen from the US.  Since they aren't geosync,
an azimth/elevation dish is required to stay on track.  I think
they are visible for 6 Hours.  There are 4 Molnyia, so as one is
just setting on the horizon, another one is rising.

Another option is Intelsat.  These use circular polarization that
is not common on many consumer dishes.  Intelsat uses a so-called
hemispherical footprint to cover nearly 1/2 the globe.  Thus, thus
received power is quite weak.  You'd need a 5 to 8 meter dish to
get an acceptible picture back.

The best for unusual TV is to catch ocassional feeds that are
routed through the US domestic satellite net as they make a
multi-hop trip from Europe to Austrailia.  Sometimes, Westar IV,
transponder 14 has Russian TV (it carried Gorbachev's arms speech
yesterday).  Satcom F1 also carries BBC feeds on the upper
transponders (sometimes #18).  Satcom F4, transponder #2 is shared
with RAI TV from Itay with Bravo Entertainment channel and other
services.  The RAI is intended for US consumption, and thus arrives
already converted to NTSC; watch for this around 1600 hours,
eastern time.

US standard monitors often have enough lattitude in their sync
controls to be able to lock onto the scan frequencies used in
European TV.  A multistandard monitor is is reuqired if you want to
watch in color, though.

A book, "The Hidden Signals on Satellite TV", is useful for
information about how to retrieve FSK weather pictures, SCPC audio,
Teletext, etc.

Bill
(wtm@neoucom.UUCP)