The Navy's special receivers monitor the entire possible range of doppler
shifted frequencies, about 28 Khz. My receiver permits only a narrow observing
window of 2 Khz at any given time. Combined with the interferometer's limited
beamwidth, this system is far from capable of keeping track of all orbiting
satellites, or even detecting all newly launched ones. (The steered yagi array
however, is capable of observing most all satellites, but only with advance
notice where to look.) With patience, the interferometer does permit the
occasional capture of satellites crossing the fence within the desired spatial
and doppler windows. Commercial software is used with the A/D converter card to
capture and store the recordings to disk. The calibration standard also drives
the interferometer switching. It alternates between the three antennas,
dwelling for 20 ms. on each one in turn. The RF output of the calibration
standard is a combline spectrum with lines every 1 Khz. It also provides a time
"tick" which is recorded on the second A/D channel. With careful
calibration to the WWV time ticks over a period of a few days, the calibration
standard provides time within a few milliseconds and better than +/- 2 Hz
frequency accuracy at 217 Mhz.
