Author: Mark Jessop (VK5QI) [email protected]
This guide provides information on how to capture FFT data using the strf toolset, process it to look for satellite signals, and finally compare their doppler shift against TLEs from the SpaceTrack database. This can help with resolving the 'TLE lottery' after new launches, or cataloguing transmissions from spacecraft already in orbit.
It should be noted that the analysis described in this document is but a small subset of what the strf tools are capable of! Scott Tilley has a post describing some of the history behind strf and giving a crash course on the relationship between orbital dynamics and the doppler effect here: https://skyriddles.wordpress.com/2019/01/04/basic-orbital-dynamics/
The target platform is Debian-based distributions (e.g. Debian, Raspbian, Ubuntu), but should be applicable to other Linux-based platforms. The data processing software (rfplot and rffit) is also k