In my previous post, I mentioned the possibility of receiving 10GHz beacons reflecting off ships in the Mediterranean sea through the Paella Team WebSDR, in Alicante. Luis EA5DOM tells me that these reflections happen often. However, I didn’t get any in the time I was doing the recordings for the previous post.
After making much longer recordings, I have seen a couple of reflections. I would say that a dozen or so happen every day. However, they last for quite long. Here you can see a reflection lasting for almost 20 minutes. The Doppler shift ranges between -300Hz and -200Hz. At its strongest moment, the reflection is only 10dB weaker than the beacon.
I have being receiving several 10GHz on different WebSDRs with linrad to get a rough idea of the performance of the beacons and receivers, both in terms of frequency stability and phase noise. Here are the results.
Today, I’ve being measuring the phase noise of the different 27MHz references that I have for my Ku-band LNBF. The LNBF is an Avenger PLL321S-2. I’ve modified it, removing the 27MHz crystal and including a connector for an external 27MHz reference signal. In my lab, I have the following equipment to generate a 27MHz signal:
OCXO/Si5351A kit. This kit includes a 27MHz OCXO and a Si5351A frequency synthesizer. The Si5351A can act as a buffer and output the OCXO signal directly or generate a 27MHz clock.
A DF9NP 27MHz PLL and a DF9NP GPSDO. The GPSDO generates a 10MHz signal which is locked to GPS. The PLL generates a 27MHz from the 10MHz signal.
I’ve used linrad to receive the beacon of BADR-5 at 11966.2MHz using different references for the 27MHz signal. The AFC in linrad tries to compensate for any drift in the reference or the satellite beacon. By averaging, one can get good plots of the sideband noise of the beacon. This is far from a proper lab test, but it gives a good idea of the performance of the references.
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.
This weekend, Mike DK3WN caught GOMX-3 downloading a good amount of data. See his post here. This data consists mainly of the satellite retransmitting a lot of beacons that were generated during the last 16 hours or so.
GomSpace has recently released a complete parser for GOMX-3 beacons of type 1 0 (these are the beacons that contain ADS-B data). I have already incorporated this code into my gr-ax100 fork.
The binary data in KISS format (almost 250KB) and the parsed beacon data received during this data download is in gist. Probably the most interesting thing is the ADS-B data. Below you can see all the aircraft on the map. Clicking on any of them will show the details for that aircraft.
Since the orbit of GOMX-3 has an inclination of 51.6º, the satellite doesn’t usually detect aircraft above 55ºN or below 55ºS. GomSpace has an image which shows lots of flights received with GOMX-3. There, the major air routes and hubs are apparent.
Yesterday, the FM repeater on the Amateur satellite LilacSat-2 was active. I’ve talked about LilacSat-2 before, but so far I hadn’t made any recordings containing subaudio telemetry. While contacting several Spanish stations (EA5TT, EA1JM and EA1IW) throughout the pass, I made an IQ recording to analyse the telemetry later. Here I take a look at the telemetry format and the decoded data.
A few days ago, I talked about the modulation and coding used by the satellite GOMX-3. Here, I will look at the contents of the CSP packets transmitted by this satellite.
Yesterday, there was a big hailstorm in my town. During the storm, I rushed to the radio shack to see if this produced any effects in my Ku-band satellite receiver. This is a 95cm dish pointing to the 26ºE geostationary orbital position, and it will be used to receive Es’hail-2 in the future. In the image below, you can see that the difference is huge.
11699MHz H pol, during a hail storm (above) and just after the storm (below)
In the waterfall, you can see several beacons from broadcast satellites. It is clear that during the hailstorm the noise floor was much higher. In fact, 2.5dB higher. This is probably caused by scattering of DVB-S signals from satellites in other orbital positions, scattering of thermal ground noise, or a combination of both. Also, although it is not easy to see in the waterfall, the beacons of the satellites where weaker during the hailstorm. For instance, the beacon of BADR-5 was 0.9dB weaker, due to the increased attenuation caused by hail.
These differences may not seem large, but in fact they are. I have a cheap DVB-S2 decoder connected to the system. It usually receives fine several channels from the BADR satellites (on some other channels, the signal is not good enough, apparently). However, during the hailstorm, this receiver couldn’t even get a lock on the DVB signal.
Recently, Mike DK3WN pointed me to some decoder software for the satellite GOMX-3. This satellite is a 3U cubesat from GomSpace and transmits in the 70cm Amateur band. It has an ADS-B receiver on board, as well as an L-band SDR. As far as I know, no Amateur has decoded packets from this satellite previously, and Mike had some problems running the decoder software. I have taken a look at the software and tried my best to decode some packets from GOMX-3. So far, I have been able to do Reed-Solomon decoding and get CSP packets. However, I don’t have the precise details for the beacon format yet. Here, I describe all of my findings.
After sorting out some problems with several connectors which caused huge phase noise in the external 27MHz reference, I have my 10GHz receiver up and running as it should. This station will be used to receive Es’hail-2 in the future. The station is composed of a 95cm offset dish, an Avenger PLL321S-2 Ku-band LNBF modified to use an external 27MHz reference, an OCXO/Si5351A kit used as the 27MHz reference, an RTL-SDR, and a cheap DVB-S2 receiver as a power supply (this allows me to change polarizations and LO frequency easily).
The dish is pointing to the 26ºE or 25.5ºE orbital position, where Es’hail-2 will be. Actually, I have pointed the dish to peak the beacon from BADR-5 the best I can. To test the performance of the station, I have tried to receive the beacons from several Ku-band satellites. Here are the results.
