June 2016 – Daniel Estévez

Using the CC1101 and Beaglebone black for IP traffic on 70cm

Lately, I have been experimenting with using a CC1101 chip together with a Beaglebone black single board ARM computer to transmit IP traffic over the 70cm Amateur band. There has been a similar project from OEVSV, but I’ve never seen this project reach a final form. Edouard F4EXB has some code that uses the Raspberry Pi instead. Presumably, this will suffer from problems when using the higher data rates supported by the CC1101, as his software is not real-time.

The goal of my project is to build an affordable 70cm IP transceiver with a power of a few Watts. This can be used in the Hamnet Amateur Radio IP network. The modulation should not use more than a couple of hundreds of kHz’s of spectrum, as it doesn’t seem very sensible to take up much more spectrum in the 70cm band. Although the usual maximum bandwidth in the 70cm band is 20kHz, the IARU R1 bandplan allows for wideband experiments around 434.000MHz. A data rate of 128kbps with MSK modulation seems about right, as it uses roughly 200kHz of spectrum. Further on-the-air tests will perhaps change these parameters a bit.

KISS, HDLC, AX.25 and friends

A while ago, I uploaded my gr-kiss out-of-tree GNUradio module to Github. This is a set of blocks to handle KISS, HDLC and AX.25, which are the protocols used in amateur packet radio. There are several other OOT modules that do similar things, but I didn’t like the functionality of them very much. While programming this module, I’ve also noted that the documentation for these protocols is not so good sometimes. Here I’ll give a brief description of the protocols and explain how everything works together.

Concurso Sant-Sadurní V-UHF

Last Sunday, I hiked up Cerro de San Pedro, SOTA summit EA4/MD-020 (1425m) to work in this month’s national V-UHF contest. I was on the summit for 4 hours, from 7:00UTC to 11:00UTC, and I managed to work quite a few stations. As always, I used my portable QRP station consisting of a Yaesu FT-817ND and an Arrow satellite yagi antenna (3 elements in 144MHz and 7 elements in 432MHz).

In the map of stations worked, my position is in red, stations worked both in 144MHz and 432MHz are in green and stations worked only in 144MHz are in blue.

Trying to decode data from ÑuSat

Last Monday, a Chinese CZ-4B rocket launched the Chinese Earth observation satellite ZY-3 and the Argentinian satellites ÑuSat-1 and 2. These two satellites are the first of the Aleph-1 constellation of Earth observation satellites. ÑuSat-1 carries LUSEX, an Amateur payload which consists of a U/V linear transponder. Also, the two ÑuSat satellites transmit backup telemetry in the 70cm Amateur band, as one can see in the IARU frequency coordination application. In fact, the latest news is that ÑuSat-1 transmits telemetry on 436.445MHz and ÑuSat-2 uses 437.445MHz. According to the public announcements, the telemetry was supposed to be 9200 baud or 19200 baud. However, some people have noticed that, on the contrary, it is 40 kbaud. Although the modulation and coding specifications are not public, I’ve taken a look at an IQ recording of ÑuSat-2 by Mike DK3WN to see if I can decode anything. Here are my findings.