In my previous post I talked about the FEC used by the SMOG-P and ATL-1. In there, I reverse-engineered the long frames transmitted by SMOG-P and found that they use the AO-40 FEC protocol.
After publishing that post I started reverse-engineering the short frames. Meanwhile, Peter Horvathpointed me to a Github repository containing an implementation of the FEC used for short frames and long frames. I hadn’t seen that repository before (it’s not easy to search for SMOG-P or ATL-1 in Google, as many unrelated results come up). Indeed this repository contains the source of a FEC decoder for the short frames, so there is no need to reverse-engineer it.
Timur Kristóf, the author of that repository, says that the team plans to release the source for the decoder, but that they are currently very busy with the early operations of the satellites. This is very good news.
I have studied the code in the Github repository and included a decoder for the short FEC frames in gr-satellites.
They transmit in the 70cm Amateur satellite band, and although they have beeen successfully coordinated with IARU (see here and here), documentation about the protocols they use has not been published. There is some groundstation software available here, but the interesting part is implemented in the atlgnd_x86_64 and smogpgnd_x86_64 binary executables, for which source code is not available. As far as I know both satellites transmit using the same (or very similar) protocols.
In this post I describe my first attempts at reverse-engineering the transmissions of SMOG-P, with successful results. Preliminary support for decoding SMOG-P and ATL-1 has been added to gr-satellites in the maint-3.8 branch.
The experiments about measuring the frequency stability of the local oscillator of the QO-100 NB transponder with a Vectron MD-011 GPSDO I made a few days ago indicated that the Allan deviation of the local oscillator was probably better than \(10^{-11}\) for \(\tau\) between 1 and 100 seconds. The next step in trying to characterize the stability of the local oscillator is to use a reference clock which is more stable than the Vectron.
I contacted Achim Vollhardt DH2VA asking him if it was possible to record the downlink of the BPSK beacon at Bochum, so as to have a recording referenced to the Z3801A GPSDO in Bochum, which is much more stable than the Vectron. He and Mario Lorenz DL5MLO have been very kind and they have taken the effort to make a recording for me. This post is an analysis of this recording made at Bochum.
The Vectron MD-011 has an Allan deviation of \(10^{-11}\) at \(\tau = 1\,\mathrm{s}\) and \(2\cdot10^{-11}\) at \(\tau = 10\,\mathrm{s}\) according to the datasheet, so it is an improvement of an order of magnitude compared to my DF9NP TCXO-based GPSDO. I have made more measurements with the Vectron MD-011 as in my previous experiments, measuring the phase of the BPSK beacon transmitted from Bochum and a CW tone transmitted with my station. This post summarizes my results and conclusions.
A few days ago I tried to measure the QO-100 NB transponder LO stability using my DF9NP 10MHz GPSDO. It turned out that my GPSDO was less stable than the LO, so my measurements showed nothing about the QO-100 LO. Carlos Cabezas EB4FBZ has been kind enough to lend me a Vectron MD-011 GPSDO, which is much better than my DF9NP GPSDO and should allow me to measure the QO-100 LO.
Before starting the measurements with QO-100, I have taken the time to use the Vectron GPSDO to measure the Allan deviation of my DF9NP GPSDO over several days. This post is an account of the methods and results.
Back in August, I posted about my calculations of the site where DSLWP-B impacted with the lunar surface on July 31. The goal was to pass the results of these calculations to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team so that they could image the location and try to find the impact crater.
Yesterday, the LROC team published a post saying that they had been able to find the crash site in an image taken by the LRO NAC camera on October 5. The impact crater is only 328 metres away from the location I had estimated.
This is amazing, as in some way it represents the definitive end of the DSLWP-B mission (besides all the science data we still need to process) and it validates the accuracy of the calculations we did to locate the crash site. I feel that I should give due credit to all the people involved in the location of the impact.
Wei Mingchuan BG2BHC from Harbin Institute of Technology was the first to take the orbital information from the Chinese Deep Space Network, perform orbit propagation and compute the crash location assuming a spherical Moon, thus obtaining an approximate position in Van Gent X crater. Cees Bassa from ASTRON refined Wei’s calculations by including a digital elevation model. Phil Stooke from Western University first suggested to use a digital elevation model, helped us contact the LROC team, and filled in an observation request for the camera. And of course the LROC team and the Chinese DSN, since the quality of their ephemeris for DSLWP-B allowed us to make a rather precise estimate.
The LROC team has posted the images shown below, where in a comparison between an image taken in 2014 and the image taken in October the small crater can be seen.
DSLWP-B crash site image
The image of the crash is M1324916226L, an image taken by the left NAC camera. However, I can’t find this image yet in the LROC archive, so it seems this image hasn’t been made public yet.
The small crater, which the LROC team estimate to be 4×5 metres in diameter, is visible more clearly if we compute the difference between the before and after images (an idea of Phil Stooke). The figures below show this difference both as a signed quantity and as an absolute value.
Difference in the before and after imagesAbsolute value of the difference between before and after images
Though my eye fails to see it, the LROC team says that the long axis of the crater is oriented in a southwest-northeast direction. This is consistent with the direction of the impact, since DSLWP-B was travelling towards the northeast.
For the comparison with the October 5 image, the LROC team has chosen an image taken with a similar illumination angle. In fact, the lunar phase in both images only differs in 10º, so the shadows are very similar, with the sun located towards the southwest. In fact, the newest image of the area was taken on 2018-10-16, but the one from 2014 probably gave the most similar illumination conditions.
In my post in August I included a link to Quickmap showing the estimated area of the impact. Now I have marked in red the location of the crash. For a sense of scale, the large crater northwest of the crash is some 50 metres in diameter. You can see both points in Quickmap here.
Location of DSLWP-B crash (red) and estimate (blue)
It is good to go back to all the simulations I did to have an idea of what the 328m error represents. My final simulation was done with the ephemeris from July 25, so they were 6 days old at the moment of impact. When I used the ephemeris from July 18, the position of the impact changed by 231m, while the ephemeris from June 28 yielded a change of 496m. Therefore, it seems that an error of 300m is well in line with what we could expect of the precision of the Chinese DSN ephemeris.
The impact location computed by Cees Bassa was 2786m away from my estimate. The main problem with Cees’s estimate is that the orbital model he used considered spherical gravity for the Moon, while my studies showed that it was important to consider non-spherical gravity.
I did most of my simulations with a 10×10 spherical harmonic model for the Moon gravity, but to assess whether this was enough, I also made a simulation with a 20×20 spherical harmonic model. This yielded an impact point which was 74m away from the impact computed with the 10×10 model.
According to my Monte Carlo simulations with a 1km ephemeris error, the 1-sigma ellipse semi-axes of the impact position were 876m in the northeast direction and 239m in the southeast direction. With this information, I gave an educated guess of the position error of 600m in the northeast direction and 200m in the southeasth direction. The actual impact point is 328m northwest of my estimate, so somewhat higher than my error estimate but still within the 2-sigma ellipse. This leaves me quite happy with the quality of my estimate.
Following a long discussion with Bernd Zoelgert DL2BZ about the frequency stability of the local oscillator of the QO-100 narrowband transponder, I have decided to try to measure the Allan deviation of the transponder. The focus here is on short-term stability, so we are concerned with observation intervals around \(\tau = 1 \mathrm{s}\).
Of course, as with any measurement problem, the performance of the measurement equipment should be better than the “device under test”. In this case, to measure the QO-100 LO it is necessary to compare it against a reference clock which is more stable (ideally an order of magnitude better).
My whole station is locked to a DF9NP GPSDO, which is a 10MHz VCTCXO disciplined by a uBlox LEA-4S GPS receiver. That’s great to measure long-term stability, but for short-term measurements you are essentially relying on the stability of the VCTCXO, which is not so great. Therefore, the whole purpose of this experiment is first to determine whether my station is actually able to measure the QO-100 LO or not. Spoiler: it turns out the answer is “no”, as in most articles whose title is phrased as a question.
A while ago I spoke about feeding an external reference to the LimeSDR USB. Now I wanted to use an external reference with the LimeSDR Mini that I have in my QO-100 groundstation to lock all the system to GPS. Preferably I wanted to use 27MHz as the reference, since this is what I am using in my LNB, so this would save me from having to run 10MHz or another frequency to the groundstation.
I wasn’t so sure how well this would work, since there are a few threads with questions in the MiriadRF forums, but I haven’t seen any explaining things in a clear way. There are different anecdotes of things that worked or didn’t work for several people, but not that many definitive answers. Among all the threads, this one seems mostly helpful.
Somewhat surprisingly, everything has worked well on the first try. I am now using a 27MHz external reference with my LimeSDR Mini. Hopefully this post will be of help to other people.
Following the first alpha, I have released today v3-alpha1, the second alpha for gr-satellites 3. As I introduced in September, gr-satellites 3 will be a large refactor of gr-satellites, bringing many UI and under-the-hood changes. I am releasing a series of alphas during the development to get feedback from users. Each of the alphas focuses on a different aspect.
The second alpha is focused on input and output formats. New functionality has been implemented to allow the user to choose the input and output in a flexible way. This post describes the main features added.
Around October 9 it was the sun outage season for Es’hail 2 as seen from Madrid. This means that the sun passed behind Es’hail 2, so it was the perfect occasion to observe the sun with my QO-100 groundstation, which has a 1.2m offset dish antenna pointing to Es’hail 2. This is an account of the measurements I made, and their use to evaluate the receiver performance.
