Deep Space DX Hack Chat

Join us on Wednesday, March 5 at noon Pacific for the Deep Space DX Hack Chat with David Prutchi!

In the past 70-odd years, the world’s space-faring nations have flung a considerable amount of hardware out into the Void. Most of it has fallen back into Earth’s gravity well, and a lot of what remains is long past its best-by date, systems silenced by time and the harsh conditions that rendered these jewels of engineering into little more than space flotsam.

Luckily, though, there are still a few spacecraft plying the lonely spaces between the planets and even beyond that still have active radios, and while their signals may be faint, we can still hear them. True, many of them are reachable only using immense dish antennas.

Not every deep-space probe needs the resources of a nation-state to be snooped on, though. David Prutchi has been listening to them for years using a relatively modest backyard antenna farm and a lot of hard-won experience. He’s been able to bag some serious DX, everything from rovers on Mars to probes orbiting Jupiter. If you’ve ever wanted to give deep space DX a try, here’s your chance to get off on the right foot.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 5 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.