Jonti is probably the only source of hard information at the moment with some observations from the handful of us decoding these signals. I was only made aware of it by a John Locker who helps develop Planeplotter software.
This system has been put in place since MH370 highlighted the poor coverage of flights on trans oceanic flights, much of the early work was focussed on L-Band as it's relatively simple to attach a GPS or patch antenna to a suitable receiver but now Jonti has updated the software to decode the 10500 bd burst signals being relayed by Inmarsat from planes. The interest here of course is positioning data for air enthusiasts, I guess you'd liken it to a global ADS-B set up.
As luck had it the list of requirements that John posted perfectly matched everything attached to the PC under my bench so it was a five minute job to get it running. The 1.8m dish connects to a ProfTuners 7301, that loops out into an Airspy SDR running SDR Sharp tuned to the IF frequency and virtual audio cable allows the recovered audio to be used in Jaero. DVB Dream runs in the background to power the card and set the polarity.
Talking of polarity that is circular so you'll need to insert the depolariser plate into the LNB, I'm using a homebrew version that improves circular reception with good results from the two satellites I've been monitoring at 15W and 64.5E. I'm going to do some further searching today to see if 54W is active on C-Band. Jonti has a PDF showing possible activity on 98W and 178E but worth checking these on N2YO if you don't hear anything because 64.5E is quite heavily inclined so there are times when it's at +/-3° from arc that I don't see it.
Although I'm using an Airspy this does work on nothing more than a ten quid sdr dongle so no need for a lot of expensive outlay if you're set up for C Band and have a receiver with loop out. I think some of the dongles work better than others so worth checking which chipset it has before buying one.
The next stage of development is to add support to Planeplotter, Jonti has already added UDP streaming output to Jaero so hopefully Bev will soon have a test version of PP that accepts the streamed data. If you're into transoceanic flight monitoring, C Band and HFDL should cover all bases!
Some links for you, please delete if they're not allowed.
This is to Jonti's site where you can download Jaero.
http://jontio.zapto.org/hda1/jaero.html
A video I recorded of Jaero in action using SDR Sharp
Finally a link to a zipped 35MB IQ file that will run in SDR Sharp and let you test decoding into Jaero.
http://www.ukdx.org.uk/Paul/20-11-02_1534427kHz.zip
Paul
Sussex Coast. JO00
Icom IC-R8500, Airspy & RTL 820 SDR.
HS Publications D100 TV-DX receiver.
Sony XDR F1HD and XDR-GTK interface.
Sony 920, RDS Spy, CCW Multicoupler.
W4KMA 24-100MHz custom Log Periodic.
Wellbrook ALA1530AL1 active HF loop.
Triax MTH-13 BIII, Korner 9.2FM BII.
1.8M Precision dish, C-Band 66E-58W.
1.2M Gibertini dish, KuBand 70E-63W.
http://www.ukdx.org.uk
www.youtube.com/Aceblaggard
