Downloading Images From US Military Satellites

welcome back to the save it for Parts Channel today we're going to try to Snoop on some US military satellites using random junk in my garage now if you've seen my channel you know my random junk collection includes all kinds of satellite dish Hardware we've got these RV satellite dishes we've got this old Wi-Fi dish we've got this cand dish from the 80s that someone gave me and I've got this whole pile of other satellite adjacent gear I don't even know what some of this stuff does I just obsessively hoard it when I find it at the surplus store at auctions any time I see cheap satellite Hardware I drag it home what I want to try today is to download imagery from the US government's defense meteorological satellite program for the past 50 years the defense meteorological satellite program dmsp satellites have fulfilled the military's most critical requirements for Global atmospheric Oceanic terrestrial and space environment information through these satellites military users find track and forecast whether systems over remote and hostile areas for deployed troops these are two satellites that remain out of an original constellation of quite a few other satellites these have had some issues over their life they had some flaky batteries when they launched these so a bunch of them just exploded and right now there are only two left these were originally designed back in the 1960s 1970s they're very similar to the Noah meteorological satellites that you've seen me mess with before on this channel they're in a polar orbit they come over any given location on the earth about twice a day and an interesting feature of these uh dmsp satellites is that they are actually encrypted for most of their orbit they only unencrypt themselves when they're over North America over the us and then you can get imagery from these for free the primary weather sensor on dmsp is the operational line scan system which provides continuous Visual and infrared imagery of cloud cover over an area 600 nautical miles wide so our sensor is pointing down and sweeping sweeping back and forth six times a second photographing the Earth and then uh storing those images and transmitting them down to ground stations once every orbits a very common question I get when I do weather satellite videos is is this legal and then the second most common question is why aren't these encrypted well most of the satellites I work with are publicly funded they're from public agencies like National Weather Service like National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and they're made to be available for anybody anywhere in the world the satellites that I want to look at today are not supposed to be publicly available at least not for most of the world these are defense department satellites these are military satellites so they are actually encrypted for pretty much everyone else if you live outside the US then I'm sorry to say you might not be able to do anything with these satellites so the dmsp satellite program originated in the 1960s although the current satellites are a little newer than that this was kind of a spy satellite for spy satellites what I mean by that is the dmsp satellite would be a weather satellite and it would go over first so let's say it would go across Moscow and it would say what's the weather like is it cloudy the actual spy satellite like the corona system used film and so they didn't want to waste their film if it was cloudy and they couldn't see the ground so if the weather was nice Corona would go over it would take a film picture and that would be the one that could see like Soviet license plates so the film got spooled into a cassette magazine something like this one and that lived inside of a conical re-entry vehicle called a bucket once the bucket and film spool were full the satellite would fly over us controlled airspace eject the bucket that would reenter the Earth's atmosphere deploy a parachute and then get scooped up by a CIA aircraft yeah I don't know how many drugs the designers were on but the ' 60s were crazy beginning in 1966 it acquired a tactical as well as strategic capability and furnished the needed weather support for both activities indeed dmsp significantly increased the image search system effectiveness of nro reconnaissance satellites and of Sac SR71 and U2 reconnaissance aircraft while it markedly reduced the number of aerial meteorological sores Declassified in 1972 to dmsp data was made available to civilian and scientific user communities anyway nowadays our spy satellites are all digital they don't have to use film so the dmsp satellites are a little bit obsolete but they still do get used for weather forecasting for military operations and things of that nature these are on What's called the sand of the microwave Spectrum around 2. 2 GHz um previously we've looked at stuff in the L band that's what this little dish is set up for that's around 1. 7 GHz sand is a little more tricky it's a little harder to find commercial equipment for that although Wi-Fi is pretty close Wi-Fi is around 2.

4 GHz now another thing I've heard that works pretty well for these satellites is this Dingus called an mmds and this is apparently some kind of microwave pointto Point antenna that's common mostly over in Asia they're not very common in the US and you can't really find these in the US so um I've tried to find a few of these I don't even remember where I got this one unfortunately this one is tuned for 2500 to 2700 MHz not 2200 like I want so this one I wasted my money on this one I got from a website called AliExpress now I've never used AliExpress before I get the impression it's like a kind of sketchier more communist Amazon it a lot of people that I know have good things to say about it and a lot of people I know have terrible things to say about it um some people say you'll get great deals you'll get stuff for like a tenth of the price of Amazon other people say yeah it's a tenth the price but it takes 8 months to show up and it's a box of sand when you actually get it so I don't know whether or not this is actually any good and I'm extra hesitant because there are absolutely no markings on this thing so there are no specifications there are no serial numbers the antenna that is built into the mmds is a linear feed so this is just a little dipole this is for radio waves that are coming in in One Direction and most of these satellites that I want to look at you use a helical feed or helical polarization so the signal is coming in in kind of a spiral this is a feed I made a while back for sand it's using uh SGC derk's design and my 3D printer hates printing stuff like this so I had to hack This Together out of two failed prints I think it maybe kind of works so instead of this linear feed I'm just going to put an antenna Jack on there I hope that's good enough I'm really bad at soldering so I may or may not have destroyed this thing yeah I know that technically should be like an N Mount or something but all I have are these old CB parts so this is the save it for Parts Channel we use whatever I've got lying around all right now that we have our magic wand or sonic screwdriver or whatever this Abomination is we need a reflector dish this was originally a television dish for rving or camping if you absolutely needed to watch football in the 19 1980s you'd take this thing out with your RV you'd unfold it and you'd really piss off your family by watching TV instead of enjoying nature but um people keep asking me where do you find one of these I have no idea uh another ham in the Twin Cities named Chandler gave it to me I have never seen one again on any used websites I've seen some modern-day folding dishes like this from uh Earth Moon Earth Communications uh supply places and there are no prices listed which means you absolutely cannot afford it we're not trying to fully deploy this in the garage I just want to get to the focal point here to the L&B or low noise block we're going to remove that think's a little heavy and a little floppy we might have to reinforce it slightly now the focal point on this is probably not going to be correct because the Helix is kind of way out here but I can slide this arm in and out so if we need to move this farther or closer to the dish we can do that later next we need to figure out how to power this mmds thing most of these devices like low noise amplifiers uh lnbs lnas needs some kind of DC voltage and this just has one input so we're going to need something like a power injector or a bias T to inject a DC voltage into the antenna line and then we may need a DC blocker to keep that voltage from going back into our radio just a couple extra parts that are needed for this I have some of that stuff lying around already I don't actually know what voltage this wants a lot of amateur level lmbs want 5 vol volts but a lot of satellite equipment wants 14 to 16 volts and this isn't even a satellite device this is like a I don't even know what this is it's like Korean Wi-Fi or something I looked up the power requirements it looks like the mmds wants 12 volts so we've got an adapter for that then we're going to have to feed it somehow so I got to dig through my other box of satellite parts and accessories and connectors and whatnot somewhere in here I think I have just a bias te just a little inline power injector that will give whatever voltage I want into the RF line now most software to find radios like the rtls strr or the hack rf1 have a Bist built in and they will feed voltage out to an LNA or another device but usually these are only feeding 5 volts and we need 12 couldn't find the one that I thought I had but I did find this other one looks like it needs some soldering first again not a great solder job I fully expect this to break at some point during the making of this video I went on ino. com and looked up a bunch of upcoming satellite passes the dmsp satellites that I most interested in are kind of An Inconvenient time slots we're using the newc hack rf1 we've got our bias we've got the power supply for the bias te got that hooked up to the dish now the local oscillator in that mmds Dingus is supposed to be 1. 99 GHz so I need to offset uh SDR Plus+ so that it's seeing uh the incoming frequency minus that local oscillator for the final frequency here the hack rf1 can go all the way up into sand uh by itself but the mmds is down converting anyway so we'll just use that uh new frequency so SDR Plus+ actually has that as an option for the offset already so it has that 1998 MHz uh mmds right in there in the drop- down menu that's convenient so to track the satellite I use an app called stellarium which I absolutely cannot recommend it is terrible but it's the only thing I can find that actually gives me a heads up display where I can hold the phone up in the air and it gives me kind of an AR augmented reality view of where the satellite is so I can track and follow it so I've got my phone velcroed onto the dish so we can use that heads up display I had stellarium working for a moment it has decided to crap out again as the satellite passes overhead I want to try to keep the dish aimed at it as close as possible we're going to record the signal on the laptop and then we will run that through sat dump later on and try to decode that okay so my first try with this was a complete failure I saw absolutely nothing but my first tries with satellite things are usually a complete failure so we're going to try again let's talk about Orbits for a minute Carl over at us radio guy has a great animation of how some of these different orbits work so a geostationary orbit like the go satellite which I've looked at before is far enough away from the earth where its orbit goes around once every 24 hours so it is always centered above one spot on the earth and it always sees about onethird of the Earth's surface when you space three of these satellites around the earth you've get complete weather coverage and there are more than three because other countries have different satellites up in similar orbits now if we zoom in closer to the Earth's surface we get low earth orbit satellites and specifically polar orbits so these go around the earth basically every 90 minutes or so and they follow a north to south tracks so on one side of the planet they're going from the North Pole to South Pole on the other side of the orbit they're going South Pole to North Pole they are sun synchronous so their orbit is pretty much always in line with the Sun and the Earth rotates underneath them so during the course of the day each satellite sees a slightly different track of the earth if you want to know more about satellite stuff us ru.

com is a fantastic resource and Carl has all kinds of information over there which has really helped me out and I have recommended him to all kinds of people so I'll throw some links to him down in the description below and I'll throw a link to the original video here as well with the low earth orbit satellites we have to track them as they go over head because relative to us on the ground they're moving pretty quickly and we get about a 10 to 15 minute window when they're directly overhead and we can get a good enough signal to decode weather images all right this is about the fourth satellite I've tried today and it seems like we might be getting something but it's not a very strong signal and now it's raining so I am absolutely giving up on this for today at least the Ducks are happy about this since I had some issues with the hacker F1 we're going to try the rtlsdr this time it does not have as much bandwidth as the hacker F1 and cannot go as high in frequency range so it's not really as good for sand but if we trust the uh mmds here which I guess I kind of do it seems like it's mostly working then the mmds should downon convert from Sand to something that the rtlsdr here can see okay I think we've got this a little more dialed in we're looking at Sirius XM satellite radio signals we can't actually listen to the radio because it's encrypted but we can at least see what the pattern looks like we're going to give this another shot we've got dmsp 18 just coming above the Horizon so we're going to try and track that see if we can record it I think we might have actually got something this time and I think we might have seen where it went from encrypted to unencrypted that was kind of cool the signal changed dramatically so let's run that through sat dump see if we actually are able to get an image from it I think we're synced now so I think that was where it went from encrypted to unencrypted so yeah this is definitely more promising than last time all right we definitely got something from dmsp it's not fantastic but we definitely got some data from it this time all right we finally got some data on esand from those military satellites it's not great I can't tell what it is but we've definitely got an image and this is a good start it's only taken a couple days to get to this point but now we've got something we can build on and try to get a little bit more try to refine our situation here and hopefully get something recognizable all right I am up too early in the morning for this but we've got another pass coming over so we're going to give it a shot it's also a very windy morning so The Big Dish is just blowing around everywhere like a sail I really need to set up a motorized tracking mount for these big dishes it's been on my to-do list forever we've got the geodesic Rome for that out at sandland but I just have not gotten the motors figured out all right well that pass was another complete failure I saw the satellite for just a second on the SDR screen and then I could never lock onto it again I was searching all over the place with that dish so I went digging around in my satellite stuff box again and I found two more uh possible s-band antenna feeds that I could try out we've got this thing and then we've got this crazy thing that looks like something you give your kid when you're at the state fair so if I haven't shown off the Nano VNA before this little Gadget basically is a portable antenna analyzer and I really only use it for SWR to see what the standing wave ratio is where is an antenna uh most optimized all right so here's our Loop feed and we've put that in an old camping dish that I was going to melt down for the aluminum so we've stuck that on here we've got our mmds converter kind of the same as before we've got this thing at the focal point of the dish hopefully the giant aluminum canoe there doesn't affect the signal maybe somebody can come up with a way I can make a canoe into an antenna although want to use that one as a boat so yet again another complete failure didn't get anything so this contraption didn't work since my professionally made loop antenna didn't work I made a worse one so I've just got a random Loop of wire I've got my pie pan here we'll try that next that time we got a little more signal I still was not able to decode much from it but it's getting more promising so we've got another dmsp satellite coming over this is about 8 hours later so this is not a fast process all right we finally got something semi- recognizable I can see some of the Great Lakes here I've woken up far too early to try another attempt at a decent dmsp pass normally I don't like to get up this early but I'm trying really hard to get something good out of these satellites and this is a pretty good straight overhead pass north to south we've been doing south to North it's seems like it only decrypts around 40° north latitude so it's still encrypted over the southern part of the us and it's only in the clear for the northern part I guess the southern us is secret and the military doesn't care if anybody sees the northern half so I don't know anyway um I'm not quite awake yet but we're going to try to get the dish set up in the dark get that next recording at about 6: a. m. here I'm pretty sure the neighbors think I'm crazy I think I'm crazy on the plus side doing it this early means there's no annoying sun to get on the laptop screen so no Reflections on the minus side way more mosquitoes okay so we got up before 6:00 a.

m. we got the dish set up tracked that thing over in the dark with the mosquitoes and I got absolutely nothing again so this one was dmsp f118 I don't know if 18 just isn't on right now if it doesn't work going south versus going north so we've got an upcoming pass with the relatively low elevation and I'd like to try to get it I'd also like to try to see over some trees and then I'd like to be able to get kind of down and behind the dish so it's easier to track things so to overcome some of those issues we stuck the dish up on the car if my neighbors thought I was crazy before now they know for sure all right so the signal looks great for this pass and we were able to decode several channels from the OS system we have the visible light Channel we have the infrared Channel which is not as interesting we have the thermal Channel and then my favorite a combination channel that sat dump puts together I think this one looks the best so at this point I have tried listening to both of the surviving dmsp satellites f17 and F18 they both have similar Behavior they don't seem to transmit anything on a southbound pass where they're passing over me from north to south uh they do seem to transmit on northbound passes but they're encrypted for the southern 2/3 of the US and then they switch to unencrypted somewhere around 40 Dees north latitude so um very interesting I don't know why that is some of this stuff is not documented and you're not really supposed to be seeing these signals it's not um advertised that this is available to the public but they do have that encryption turned off supposedly for passes over the polls for scientists to use and then supposedly over the us although it really seems to just be the northern third of the US and then Canada we've brought out uh the tracking antenna situation again for a couple reasons first off I'm a terrible antenna tracker when I handhold the big SE band dish over my head we didn't have much luck with it before with dmsp satellites but I think that's because those were north to south passes and the satellites aren't transmitting when they're on a descending pass a southbound pass at least over me or at least not on a frequency that I know about so um we're going to try some Northbound passes but first we're going to try this on a known satellite signal we're actually going to try some of the Noah satellites again this is an l-band Helix on this thing but I checked it with the Nano VNA and it has pretty good performance on sand as well we're going to give it a try we're going to run it through that [Music] mmds as always I use nothing but the highest quality DIY antenna components I also do have to apologize as I'm throwing out tons of jargon here and I say things like SE band dish even though I'm using it for sand this is an l-band dish which I'm also using for sand but originally it was a 2. 4 GHz or 5.

8 GHz antenna anyway um I'm mixing what the original purpose of the dish was I apologize if I'm confusing everyone uh feel free to ask questions in the comments and if I'm not too confused myself I will try to answer them this really should be up right at the feed but this thing is too flimsy for it it would it would knock off my situation there so it's down here that is hooked up to the power injector hooked up to the SDR we are running uh G predict for the rotor control which is controlling this little box over USB that is controlling our pan tilt mount which is originally for a security camera all right I think we're starting to get something here it's not super consistent but this might be the encrypted signal all right it just switched to unencrypted so we are getting a very faint signal there it's not as good as it was with the other dish though yeah sat dump says this is a garbage recording we got nothing from that pass so we're going to put the little tracking dish aside for now and we're going to go back to the folding dish and try that maybe one more time since this is a morning pass going south we probably won't get anything on the normal frequency but I have a list of alternate frequencies to try that I found online so we're going to check all those so despite stellarium best efforts I did find the satellite using G predict to aim the dish very inefficient but um we did find it I got a signal looks like a regular signal but it's on 223 7.