Category: Amateur radio

A few days ago, I spoke about my tries to decode telemetry from 1KUNS-PF. Since then, Mike Rupprecht DK3WN has managed to get in contact with Lorenzo Frezza, from the satellite team in La Sapienza, who has given us very valuable and detailed information regarding the telemetry. This has allowed me to include a fully working decoder for 1KUNS-PF in gr-satellites. Many thanks to Lorenzo for his collaboration.

Just after reading Lorenzo’s description of the coding, where he mentions Golay and Reed Solomon, I noticed that 1KUNS-PF was using the NanoCom AX100 transceiver in ASM+Golay mode. This is the same mode that the Chinese TY-2 and TY-6 satellites use, and I’ve already spoken about ASM+Golay mode in a post about TY-2. The only difference between these Chinese satellites and 1KUNS-PF is that 1KUNS-PF is currently using 1k2 (but perhaps might change to 9k6 in the future), whereas the Chinese satellites use 9k6. With this in mind, it is very easy to adapt the decoder for TY-2 to obtain a decoder for 1KUNS-PF.

Regarding my previous tries, note that I had tried to identify the syncword as 11011001111010010101110001000011, whereas the correct syncword is 10010011000010110101000111011110. My syncword candidate was inverted (this might be a problem with sideband inversion in the recording by Mike that I used) and off by one bit (due to the difficulty of deciding where the preamble ends).

After reading Lorenzo’s email, it has been a very easy and fast task to add a fully working decoder to gr-satellites, while before I wasn’t optimistic at all about the difficulty of decoding this satellite. This makes me think about two things:

• We should really check the usual suspects (i.e., popular modems) when trying to reverse-engineer some new satellite. I could have found this out by myself just by trying the AX100 ASM+Golay decoder.
• Some advice IARU Satcoord: if a satellite uses some popular hardware (for instance the U482C or the AX100) or some popular standard (CCSDS), please list that in the frequency coordination sheet. Lorenzo’s email could have been well summarised in the sentence “1KUNS-PF uses a NanoCom AX100 in the ASM+Golay mode”, and then we would have been able to decode this satellite without any effort.

Lorenzo has also sent us the telemetry format, which is rather simple. Using that, I’ve been able to add a telemetry decoder also. The new decoder for 1KUNS-PF can be found as sat_1kuns_pf.grc in gr-satellites. I have also added a sample recording to satellite-recordings. The telemetry in one of the packets in the sample recording is as follows:

CSP header:
        Priority:		2
        Source:			1
        Destination:		9
        Destination port:	10
        Source port:		37
        Reserved field:		0
        HMAC:			0
        XTEA:			0
        RDP:			0
        CRC:			0
Container: 
    beacon_counter = 4274
    solar_panel_voltage = ListContainer: 
        2448.0
        2448.0
        2432.0
    eps_temp = ListContainer: 
        1.0
        3.0
        2.0
        2.0
    eps_boot_cause = 7
    eps_batt_mode = 3
    solar_panel_current = 0.0
    system_input_current = 80.0
    battery_voltage = 8262.0
    radio_PA_temp = 4.0
    tx_count = 45584
    rx_count = 0
    obc_temp = ListContainer: 
        1.0
        1.0
    ang_velocity_mag = 10
    magnetometer = ListContainer: 
        288.0
        0.0
        0.0
    main_axis_of_rot = 89

Last Friday, three Amateur cubesats were deployed from the ISS as part of the KiboCUBE program. These were Irazú, a 1U cubesat from Costa Rica which is the first satellite in orbit from a Central American country; UBAKUSAT, a 3U cubesat from Istanbul Technical University, Turkey; and 1KUNS-PF, a 1U cubesat from University of Nairobi, Kenya, developed jointly with University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy.

Irazú and UBAKUSAT both use standard 9k6 FSK packet radio (AX.25 with G3RUH scrambler), so they can be decoded with direwolf and many other packet radio decoders. However, no one has been able to decode 1KUNS-PF yet, due to the lack of information about the modulation and coding used. Mike Rupprecht DK3WN has some information about 1KUNS-PF, including a recording of some packets. I’ve taken a look at Mike’s recording and here are my findings.

Recently I have added a telemetry parser to the S-NET decoder in gr-satellites. Recall that I have talked about S-NET and its decoder in a previous post. To implement this telemetry parser I have used the information in Mike Rupprecht DK3WN’s web, some additional information shared by the S-NET team, as well as some recordings done by Mike. Many thanks to Mike and the S-NET team for all their help. Here I describe a few details about the telemetry.

PolyITAN-2-SAU, or QB50 UA01, is a cubesat from National Technical University of Ukraine, that was launched on May 2017 as part of the QB50 proyect. When it was launched, I made a recording of several QB50 satellites, including PolyITAN-2-SAU. Presumably, the modulation and coding used by this satellite is 9k6 BPSK AX.25, with G3RUH scrambling. Back then, I commented that although the signal was strong and I could get a clean constellation plot, I was unable to get valid AX.25 packets.

I had completely forgotten this satellite, but the other day I saw that Andy UZ7HO had added support for PolyITAN-2-SAU to his SoundModem. I asked Andy for some help, since I suspected that the coding wasn’t exactly standard G3RUH AX.25.

The trick is that this satellite uses two “layers” of NRZI encoding. The relevant part of the decoder is shown below. The BPSK symbols come in from the left of the figure and the AX.25 packets exit by the right. A standard G3RUH AX.25 decoder wouldn’t have the extra NRZI decoder on the right.

Note that NRZI decoding and G3RUH descrambling commute, since the G3RUH polynomial has an odd number of terms. Therefore, the decoder can also be organized in a different way, with both NRZI decoders at one side (either the input or output) of the descrambler.

Having two NRZI decoders in chain is a really funny concept, so it almost seems as some kind of mistake from the satellite team (most QB50 satellites use standard BPSK or FSK AX.25 packet radio for compatibility). In fact, if we write an NRZI decoder as \(y_n = 1 + x_n + x_{n-1}\), where \(x_n\) is the input sequence, \(y_n\) is the output sequence and the operations are performed on the finite field \(GF(2)\), then the effect of two NRZI decoders in chain can be written as\[z_n = 1 + y_n + y_{n-1} = 1 + x_n + x_{n-2},\] which is a rather strange form of differential decoder.

Thanks to Andy for giving me the clue about the extra NRZI decoder, as I would have had a hard time in finding it by myself (although, in retrospective, it is not that difficult to guess it by looking at the descrambled stream and seeing how HDLC 0x7e flags can be obtained from it). I have now added a decoder for PolyITAN-2-SAU to gr-satellites.

S-NET is a swarm of 4 cubesats from TU-Berlin. Their mission is to test SLink, an S-band transceiver for inter-satellite communications. They were launched on February 1 this year and they use use Amateur frequencies for their telemetry downlink on the 70cm band. Several weeks ago, Mike Rupprecht DK3WN raised my attention towards these satellites. Since they use a rather particular coding, custom software would be needed to decode the telemetry. Then, I set to add support for S-NET to gr-satellites

After some really helpful communication with the S-NET team, in particular with Walter Frese, and some exchanges of ideas with Andrei Kopanchuk UZ7HO, who was also working to add an S-NET decoder to his soundmodem, I have finally added a basic S-NET decoder to gr-satellites.