Radio Scanner - Hooking to FTA Dish?

[Davage]

I very quickly saw something on DrDish TV (on 43W satellite) about satellite espionage, and the graphic that I saw on the screen seemed to show a regular radio scanner hooked up to a satellite dish to scan the skies for audio feeds. (or at least that's what my brain saw) That got me thinking, I wonder if there would be a way that I could somehow slave my scanner off of the FTA set and somehow scan the skies looking for radio feeds etc.

Probably 20 years or so ago, a company called Heil manufactured an analog SCPC radio that could be used to tune into analog SCPC radio broadcasts. Most are probably digital now, but it got me thinking, has anybody here tried using a radio scanner to scan for other audio feeds that normally aren't picked up by a regular satellite television receiver tuning into the audio subcarriers?

Sounds like a fun plan to me.

 

[iafirebuff]

I have used a "scanner" to pick up the Spac Station before. Not sure what is up there that a scanner could pick up from the satellites. Interesting question... I am anxious for some responses

 

[mastermesh]

I've seen data tps show up on the pansat 3500 when aimed at a lot of different stuff in the arc. It'd be interesting to hear if this works. I think Nasa's website has the coords of the space station, and a few special satellites up in the sky that send out various signals. Some of those signals might well be radio?

 

[Anole]

some thoughts on the subject

Most radio scanners that I'm aware of don't cover much of the range of frequencies of interest.

The satellite receiver really has its front end (local oscillator and first mixer) in the LNB.
What's fed down the cable is the first IF frequency.
It's in the range of 950 to maybe 2150 mhz (I might be off a bit, that's from memory).
That's the range the radio would need to tune.

Off hand, I don't know what there is in that range of frequencies, and am not aware why anyone would build an end-user radio to cover those frequencies.
If you have one which will, just hook it to the IF out of your satellite receiver.
You might want to watch out for signal overload into the scanner.

Set the sat receiver for V transponders and let your radio scan
Then, change to H transponders and scan again.
Change birds and repeat.

A lot of police scanners are built to do FM mode.
Were you looking for an FM carrier, and AM one (not likely), or SSB (heaven forbid!).?
I'd think most communications would be digital, and scanners don't really have that capability.
A blind-scan sat receiver, set to look for radio stations, would seem the best tool.
Or, maybe some government organization is using a non-standard mode so they won't be noticed.
Just don't expect to find 'em this easily.

Doesn't look promising, but have fun.

 

[photoman76]

It's dated, but here is a transcript of the late Gary Bourgois on Friday Night Live talking about audio subcarriers:

http://www.nmia.com/~roberts/audio.fnl

 

[Davage]

OK, now this would be a bit of an interesting setup, but I have an old Analog GI2400 receiver that I occasionally slave off of the back of my Fortec receiver so that I can tune in some analog channels. This old GI2400 receiver has a 70Mhz loop on it if I recall correctly. I am wondering if I can somehow tape into this 70Mhz loop snd scan a range of frequencies off of it. I'm assuming that there is no LNB power of any sort coming out of that loop, and possibly there might be a way to scan those frequencies. I could be off in left-field totally on this one, but it sounds like a fun challenge. (or after 2 hours of no results, I could give up the idea completely )

 

[starman345]

OK, now this would be a bit of an interesting setup, but I have an old Analog GI2400 receiver that I occasionally slave off of the back of my Fortec receiver so that I can tune in some analog channels. This old GI2400 receiver has a 70Mhz loop on it if I recall correctly. I am wondering if I can somehow tape into this 70Mhz loop snd scan a range of frequencies off of it. I'm assuming that there is no LNB power of any sort coming out of that loop, and possibly there might be a way to scan those frequencies. I could be off in left-field totally on this one, but it sounds like a fun challenge. (or after 2 hours of no results, I could give up the idea completely )

I used to listen to scpc on subcarrier using a tv audio band radio($15 from Walmart). I used the 70mhz out of my satellite receiver, I don't think there is voltage there but you should use a power blocking splitter just to be sure, don't want to fry anything, or just put a meter on it and see whats there. I l doubt there is any scpc anymore, haven't checked for a long time and the lists I used to watch are long gone. FM squared was another subcarrier audio mode although I never tuned any of those.
I"m not aware of anything radio on analog satellite now. There used to be several satellite related talk shows - call in formats at one time but those are gone. As far as dvb, I would be interested if anyone knows of any interesting carriers.

 

[grusome]

I used to hook an old shortwave receiver to the I.F. output from an old GI2400r and tune thru some of the C-band sats transponders and everyone once in a while (seems like it was on one of the old Galaxy sats) I would find a whole slew of Telephone calls. Most were one sided, but, once in a while I could get both.
Had to use either Upper Sideband or Lower Sideband to get the signals and then also had to do a bit of fine tuning for it to work. It was interesting at times and others just plain boring. It might even work with a Ku band setup. Never even thought to try it !!
grusome

 

[N5XZS]

There are some scanner radios that can go from 100 KHz to 3.3 GHz, some of the brands names are AOR, ICOM and some others.

I have a AOR 8200 handheld that covers 150 KHz to 2 GHz I think and I also have ICOM R-3 that will cover 500 KHz to 2.450 GHz it's a video and audio scanner radio! :

There is catch you need to convert from BNC " AOR 8200 and ICOM R3.

To check it out the ads on the radio hobby mag, called Popular Communications or just go to ICOM's website and AOR's website.

Have fun radio DXing on the birds!!:

 

[Azel]

Yes! I did the same thing with a ssb receiver. I recall I could only hear one side of the telephone conversation. That was 20 years ago. I doubt if there's much to listen to these days.

 

[Davage]

I'm going to be going to the Hamfest in Dayton Ohio in 2 weeks time. I'll chat with some of the Ham Operators to see what they think, and if they've been doing any of this type of experiment. A scanner that goes from 100Khz to 3.3Ghz sounds awesome! Maybe there will be one at the Hamfest to look at..

Thanks for all of the input everyone!

 

[WildeComputers]

Reading through this got me curious if it wouldn't be possible to use a DVB satellite card and PCI radio tuner card in a PC. I have a FM tuner card and its software is very flexible for station scanning. Oddly enough, it does have two "inputs". One is a coax connection, the other is a RCA connection. Just would need to figure out a way to create a cable to connect the two. Maybe there is software on the Net already that could route the two through software instead of a physical cable connection.

 

[caddata]

Believe it or not.....when all of the satellite transmissions were C Band analog, it was possible to listen in on telephone conversations. You could only hear one side of the conversation, and you could not understand the conversation very well, if at all. I played with it for a while, using my shortwave receiver, but found it boring as compared to watching all of the unscrambled cable TV and wild feed transmissions that were available.

The old C Band receivers all had a "baseband out" connection on the back panel. The "baseband" signal could be processed, with a regular shortwave radio receiver, to actually listen to phone conversations that were being transmitted via C Band satellite. Some of the transmissions used the upper and lower sidebands, just like shortwave and ham radio bands were using.

Most satellites carried television, data, and telephone streams at the same time on different transponders. Later, some satellites were dedicated to telephone streams only. None of the streams were scrambled and were easy to decode. For each television transponder to carry one stream, a transponder dedicated to data or telephone could carry thousands of streams. Many of the televisions streams carried sideband radio transmissions, just as it's being done on Ku now, if your receiver had tuneable audio, you could listen thru your TV. However, most receivers would only tune 6.8 or 7.2 Mhz. audio channels and wouldn't work well. I remember listening to thousands of radio network and independent stations just on the television transponders.

This was a touchy subject concerning Federal Communications Commission's enforcement of the laws at the time. It wasn't illegal to intercept the transmissions, but it was illegal to use the information from the transmissions for anything other than just listening. Laws were later changed, added, and adapted to make even the interception illegal.

Things like the telephone and wild feeds have made this hobby the most interesting one that I could have even imagined for more than twenty years.

Harold