The Lab is where the engineering happens. Live SDR ground stations receiving satellite signals, interactive antenna tuning tools, and experiments at the edge of what’s possible with RF hardware. Explore freely.
Live Stations
QO100 WebSDR
Receive the geostationary QO100 amateur satellite live from Bavaria. Tune across the narrowband transponder and listen in from your browser โ no hardware required.
Inmarsat L-Band WebSDR
Live L-Band receiver covering Inmarsat satellites at 1.5 GHz. Built on a nolle.engineering L-Band helix and available around the clock in the browser.
Antenna Tuning
Antenna Tuning Tools
Helical antennas perform best when sized exactly for your target frequency. These interactive tools calculate helix geometry โ turns, diameter, pitch โ for any use case from QO100 uplink to hydrogen line radio astronomy.
Experiments
Quantum Entropy Source
True randomness from quantum physical processes โ not an algorithm. This project explores hardware entropy extraction at the component level, where unpredictable physical events become a cryptographically useful bitstream.
Early-stage exploration bridging RF hardware knowledge with quantum noise sources and entropy conditioning circuits. The kind of project that starts with curiosity and ends with a product.
Thought Experiments
Not everything in the Lab has a circuit board yet. This is where the harder speculative questions get worked through in writing โ staying inside known physics, and honest about where the ground runs out.
๐ฐ๏ธ Von Neumann Probes
A self-replicating interstellar probe, from first principles: what it would have to be, why anyone would build one, and whether โ once possible โ it would inevitably get built. Four studies, from the hard engineering of the seed to the game theory of pulling the trigger.