Amateur Records the "Sound" of Mars Express

gyrogeerloose writes "A French amateur radio operator who built his own ground station using equipment from an abandoned telecom uplink site has listened in on the ESA's Mars Express space probe. While his antenna is too small to allow him to download actual data, he was able to record and convert the signal of the probe's X-Band transmitter into an audio file."

Re:DeCSS

[Ethanol-fueled]

Learn to doppler. Refer to the picture in TFA. See that green shit at the top? The "mesa" is the noise and the peak is the tone we hear. As the spaceship flies outta sight, the peak will shift left while decreasing in height. The purple-colored graph is a record of the signal strength over time.

Re:Hire him

[tftp]

If this guy has so much motivation trying to do this as a hobby, ESA should step forward and hire him straight away.

There are many hams who build their own microwave radios for 10 or 24 GHz (and for other bands too) from parts [kuhne-electronic.de]. This guy, motivated and all, was mostly using off the shelf equipment. For example, look at these photos [ham-radio.com] of ham rigs - and note that those are mobile setups because the rules of the contest encourage roving.