Dozing on a red eye flight and woke to the Cresent Moon and Mercury rising.

Last week, I was using the surviving DSCS-III spacecraft to torture-test a new tracking system. Turns out they’re still spread around GEO in roughly global-coverage geometry, about 120° apart. That sent me back to the beacons. 🛑 bsky.app/profile/coas...

The comparison is hard to ignore: USA-134 still shows the old legacy telemetry, USA-167 now retains the framing but not the old payload, and WGS-6 looks strikingly like present-day USA-167. ⬇️ Article + data + notebook: github.com/ScottTilley/...

A few years ago I noticed an ~800-baud BPSK signal from WGS-6 and filed it away as “interesting.” Today I finally chased it down. Something very familiar is hiding in that signal, and the trail leads straight back to DSCS-III.🧵⬇️

Even with the thick forest fire haze some interesting near Earth asteroids are easily tracked. Lots of angular motion of a hour or two of tracking. 2000 VY137 (mag 14.7) from 2026-08-05 and 2004 OT11 (mag 13.8) from 2025-08-06.

NROL-95's payload appears to be NOSS related. Monitoring 2277.5MHz for reasons other than this, I noted a strong NOSS like emission pass through the beam. Earlier hits confirm. New NOSS use a different channel than the operational NOSS, either 2222.5, 2232.5 & 2277.5Mhz.

Here's a plot showing the details of the animation of the Viterbi the direct bits. You can see the dip behind the tree starting to emerge nicely in the corrections... The sky-track plot reveals it, imagine a tree top in the middle of that bottoming out of the trajectory. 🛑

Some more fun with USA 134 (DSCS III B-13) beacon applying Viterbi corrections. The spacecraft dips behind a cedar tree for testing purposes. 😎 @ea4gpz came up with a convolutional encoder.🧵⬇️ destevez.net/2020/06/reve...

Opps missing table 🙄

We decoded 1,251 USA 134 telemetry words over 41m40s with zero parity errors and reproduced the spacecraft status display from the beacon data and made a new dashboard. USA 134 appears to be in hibernation. 🛑

The thesis also shows the original DSCS III-B operational display built from those fields. I wonder if we can make a more modern live dashboard? ⬇️

What exactly is still coming out of a 30-year-old military communications satellite? A 1992 AFIT thesis documents the DSCS III-B beacon telemetry. Bits 49–100 the general configuration of the spacecraft's communications payload including a classified telemetry option...🧵⬇️

I then extended Daniel’s work into a live DSCS monitor: onboard clock, computer UTC, parity and clock-step checks, bit-change alerts, CSV logging and a rolling telemetry raster. A mount software test became a live comparison of two 1990s military communications satellites. 🛑

That localizes USA 167’s behaviour: its beacon framework is alive, but normal encoded telemetry does not appear to be reaching the channel-7 masking stage. Intentional mode, inhibited routing or onboard fault? The waveform alone cannot tell us. ⬇️

USA 134 became the control. Same antenna, receiver, demodulator and decoder: zero parity errors, a valid full spacecraft clock advancing exactly 2 seconds per word, and stable spacecraft data in bits 49–100. The decoding chain was not the problem. ⬇️

USA 167 looked healthy until the telemetry stage: clean BPSK, correct frame lock, expected PN periods, the channel-6 inverse check and message sync. But unmasking channel 7 yielded a constant mark stream—no valid parity and no advancing clock. 🤷‍♂️⬇️

Both have a 800-baud DSCS III beacon near 7600/7604.7 MHz. @ea4gpz's earlier work showed how to separate its 8 interleaved channels, identify the PN sequences, remove the mask, check the convol. code & recover the clock from an earlier recording I made.⬇️ x.com/coastal8049/...

USA 134 and USA 167 are ideal torture-test targets. Both remain continuously visible from my station, but their inclined geosynchronous orbits move substantially in declination. At X-band, the dish has to track accurately for hours/days/weeks/months... 😉⬇️

The original job was validating my Linux tracking chain: Gpredict → rotctld → Hamlib INDI → OnStep. New failsafe code now rejects stale or missing position data instead of allowing a bad command to reach the mount with proper OnStep/INDI integration finally. ⬇️

A mount-control torture test turned into a spacecraft telemetry investigation. Tracking two DSCS III satellites at X-band, I found USA 134 still sending clean telemetry, while USA 167 appears to transmit the beacon framework without encoded telemetry reaching channel 7. 🧵⬇️

Ryan Lebois of @SEE_Aerospace presents our ghost tracking results of Blue Ghost at the 2026 Astrodynamics Specialist Conference in Whistler, BC. Thanks to @amsat-dl.org for their contribution.

MERIDIAN 11 [68571, 2026-071A] has replaced in the same constellation slot as MERIDIAN 7 which is now inoperative. Decoded the TTY beacon sequence and it shares a similar linage to MERIDIAN 10.

I'll be attending 2026 AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference at Whistler, BC. Presenting a paper on the tracking of Blue Ghost where @amsat-dl.org, SEE_Aerospace and I 'ghost' tracked it to inform the utility of 3-way Doppler augmentation. Hoping to see many friends there.

I spoke with Gadi Schwartz of NBC News NOW about the oldest known zombie satellite TRANSIT 5B-5 and, hopefully, helped clear up the record on this story and a few related topics. You can watch the interview at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern on NBC News NOW on, YouTube, or NBC . com. Credit: APL

Ironically, the oldest NAVSTAR satellite in operation is the last to be detected in my audit of GPS L1. NAVSTAR 48 (USA 151), [26407, 2000-040A]. It turns 26 on July 16th. Sense where I'm going with this?

I'm glad to see the astronauts safely home! I hope the world finds the focus and real reasons to continue manned space exploration for the benefit of all mankind. Onto the next tracking mission...

Yesterday's image also reveals ships easily.

Oh my! The latest of the Chinese LEO weather satellites are capable of detecting ships at sea. One of the BC Ferries is in the middle of the Salish Sea and underway. See her specs below for reference. AIS plot from a few 10s of minutes after the pass also provided.

Almost sunset and FENGYUN-3G (the low flying weather sat) shows us the Cascade volcano shadows nicely. I miss NOAA 15 for these types of images as its aesthetic was the best.

The most profound thing I've heard from Artemis II thus far. "You're go to go" (audio on)