Amateur radio – Page 34 – Daniel Estévez

Some measurements of CAS-2T on orbit 25

Last Thursday, a CZ-11 Chinese rocket launched from Jiuquan. Alan Kung BA1DU posted in amsat-bb some minutes after launch saying that this launch contains an Amateur payload: CAS-2T. As it is usual with Chinese Amateur satellites, little information is available publicly and we hadn’t heard about CAS-2T before.

According to BA1DU, CAS-2T is a 2U Cubesat with a CW beacon on 70cm and a V/U FM transponder. The satellite will not separate from the upper stage of the rocket, so it will decay between 10 and 30 days before launch. However, this is not correct. After launch, CAS-2T was identified as object 2016-066E by Mike Rupprecht DK3WN using Doppler measurements. This object is on a 1030km x 500km elliptical orbit, so it will not decay soon. Apparently, due to a problem in the launch, the upper stage of the rocket has being put in this 10 year+ orbit. Indeed, there are radar TLEs for 6 objects from this launch. Four of them are on circular orbits of roughly 500km height, while the other two are on elliptical orbits of 1030km x 500km radius. All of these orbits will last for many years.

Reports of CAS-2T from Amateurs worldwide agree that the CW signal has good strength, but it suffers much fading. Unfortunately, the FM transponder does not function properly. It seems to respond well to an uplink signal, but it doesn’t modulate properly, as if it lacked power or suffered some other problem. On Friday afternoon, I took an SDR recording of the CW and FM signals of CAS-2T during its orbit 25. Here I show some measurements of these signals. The recording was done with a 7 element yagi and a FUNcube Dongle Pro+, and it has been Doppler corrected using the TLE for object 2016-066E, which gives a very good match.

Reverse-engineering Outernet in GNU Radio blog

I have published a post in the GNU Radio blog about my reverse engineered GNU Radio Outernet receiver gr-outernet. I cover more or less the same information as in a previous post in this blog, but I include lots of screenshots. Many thanks to Ben Hilburn and Johnathan Corgan for contacting me to write this post in the GNU Radio blog and for their useful suggestions.

Head over to the GNU Radio blog and read the post: Reverse-engineering Outernet.

Reverse engineering Outernet: time and file services

In my last two posts, I’ve being talking about my reverse engineering efforts with the Outernet signal and I’ve described the modulation, coding and framing and the L3 and L4 network protocols used in Outernet. This post is the last in this series. Here I talk about how the time and file services work. Recall that a Free Software implementation of an Outernet receiver based on these descriptions is now available at gr-outernet and free-outernet.

Reverse engineering Outernet: L3 and L4 protocols

This is a follow-up to my last post, where I talked about my efforts to reverse engineer the protocols used in the Outernet L-band signal. Here I will describe the L3 and L4 protocols that are used in Outernet.

This description is solely based upon my reverse engineering efforts. As there is no documentation available for this protocols, I get to name them as I like. Also, I’ll describe the protocols just from how they appear to work. Probably the developers at Outernet had something a bit different in mind. In any case, my understanding of how the protocols work seems quite good, as I have now a functional file receiver called free-outernet. In my next post I’ll talk about how the Outernet time service and file service work.

Reverse engineering Outernet: modulation, coding and framing

Outernet is a company whose goal is to ease worldwide access to internet content. They aim to provide a downlink of selected internet content via geostationary satellites. Currently, they provide data streams from three Inmarsat satellites on the L-band (roughly around 1.5GHz). This gives them almost worldwide coverage. The downlink bitrate is about 2kbps or 20MB of content per day.

The downlink is used to stream files, mostly of educational or informational content, and recently it also streams some APRS data. As this is a new radio technology to play with, it is starting to get the attention of some Amateur Radio operators and other tech-savvy people.

Most of the Outernet software is open-source, except for some key parts of the receiver, which are closed-source and distributed as freeware binaries only. The details of the format of the signal are not publicly known, so the only way to receive the content is to use the Outernet closed-source binaries. Why Outernet has decided to do this escapes me. I find that this is contrary to the principles of broadcasting internet content. The protocol specifications should be public. Also, as an Amateur Radio operator, I find that it is not acceptable to work with a black box receiver of which I can’t know what kind of signal receives and how it does it. Indeed, the Amateur Radio spirit is quite related in some aspects to the Free Software movement philosophy.

For this reason, I have decided to reverse engineer the Outernet signal and protocol with the goal of publishing the details and building an open-source receiver. During the last few days, I’ve managed to reverse engineer all the specifications of the modulation, coding and framing. I’ve being posting all the development updates to my Twitter account. I’ve built a GNUradio Outernet receiver that is able to get Outernet frames from the L-band signal. The protocols used in these frames is still unknown, so there is still much reverse engineering work to do.

Simulating JT modes: how low can they get?

In this post I’ll show how one can use the signal generation tools in WSJT-X to do decoding simulations. This is nothing new, since the performance of the modes that WSJT-X offers has being thoroughly studied both with simulations and real off-air signals. However, these tools seem not very widely known amongst WSJT-X operators. Here I’ll give some examples of simulations for several JT modes. These can give the operators a hands-on experience of what the different modes can and cannot achieve.

Please note that when doing any sort of experiments, you should be careful before jumping to conclusions hastily. You should make sure that the tools you’re using are working as they should and also as you intend to (did you enter correctly all the parameters and settings?). Also, you should check that your results are reproducible and agree with the theory and other experiments.

Another warning: some of the software that I’ll be showing here, in particular the Franke-Taylor soft decoder for JT65 and the QRA64 mode, is still under development. The results that I show here may not reflect the optimal performance that the WSJT-X team aims to achieve in the final release version.

After all these warnings, let’s jump to study the modes. We’ll be considering the following modes: WSPR, JT9A, JT65A, JT65B and QRA64B. To give our tests some purpose, we want to find the decoding threshold for these different modes. This is the signal to noise ratio (SNR) below which the probability of a successful decode is too small to be useful (say, lower than 20%). For each mode, we will generate 100 test files containing a single signal with a fixed SNR. We will then see how many files can be successfully decoded for each SNR.

LilacSat-1 Codec 2 downlink

LilacSat-1 is one of the satellites that will form part of the QB50 constellation, a network of 50 cubesats built by different universities around the world that will conduct studies of the thermosphere. LilacSat-1 is Harbin Institute of Technology’s satellite in the QB50 constellation, and is expected to launch late this year. Incidentally, his “brother” LilacSat-2 launched in September 2015, and it has become a popular satellite because of its Amateur Radio FM repeater.

Apparently, LilacSat-1 will feature a very novel transponder configuration: FM uplink and Codec2 digital voice downlink. I have discovered this yesterday while browsing the last updates to the Harbin Institute of Technology gr-lilacsat github repository. In fact, there is no mention of digital voice in the IARU coordination page for LilacSat-1. According to the coordination, the transponder will be mode V/U (uplink in the 144MHz band and downlink in the 435MHz band). However, it seems that only downlink frequencies have been coordinated with IARU. Hopefully the uplink frequency will lie in the satellite subband this time. LilacSat-2 is infamous because of its uplink at 144.350MHz, which lies in the SSB subband in the Region 1.

Codec2 is the open source digital voice codec that is used in FreeDV. This makes LilacSat-1 very exciting, because Codec2 is the only codec for digital voice radio that is not riddled with patents. Moreover, it performs much better than its main competitor: the AMBE/IMBE family of codecs, which are used in D-STAR, DMR and Yaesu System Fusion. Codec2 can achieve the same voice quality as AMBE using roughly half the bitrate.

Harbin Institute of Technology has recently published a GNUradio decoder for the Codec2 downlink and an IQ recording to test the decoder. Here I take a quick look at this code and I talk a bit about the possibilities of using Codec2/FreeDV in satellites.

Concurso QSL V-UHF

Today I’ve hiked to Cerro de San Pedro, SOTA summit EA4/MD-020 (1425m), to work in the last national V-UHF contest of the year: concurso QSL. This contest is a bit particular, because it coincides with the IARU-R1 UHF & up contest, so the contacts in the UHF & up bands count for both contests. As always, I’m participating in the 6 hours category with my QRP station: a FT-817ND with 5W and a 3 element yagi on 144MHz and 7 element yagi on 432MHz (the Arrow satellite yagi).

I arrived at the summit at 8:00UTC and worked until the end of the contest, at 14:00UTC, so I could enjoy almost 6 full hours of operation. As expected, after 12:00UTC there where few people left in the contest, as almost everybody had gone for lunch. The map of stations worked is below. Stations in green where worked both on 144MHz and 432, stations in blue where worked only on 144MHz and my operating position is marked in red.

Participation has been perhaps a bit low and propagation was not so good at times, but overall I’m happy with my results, which compare well with other contests this year. I missed some usual stations from the zones EA3 and EA5. I think that propagation to these zones was only open briefly during the contest.

AISAT and ATHENOXAT-1

It turns out that the satellites AISAT and ATHENOXAT-1 use the NanoCom U482C transceiver from GomSpace. This is the same transceiver that GOMX-1 uses, so the same decoder can be used.

I’ve added example flowgraphs and wav recordings to gr-ax100 and complete decoders to gr-satellites. Note that there is no telemetry parser yet, because I don’t have the telemetry format used by these satellites. Thanks to Jan PE0SAT for sending me an AISAT recording and to Roland PY4ZBZ for sending an ATHENOXAT-1 recording (note that this satellite is on a low inclination orbit, so it can only be received near the equator).

I’m on the lookout for any other satellites using the NanoCom U482C transceiver or the NanoCom AX100 transceiver (this is the transceiver that GOMX-3 uses), as it should be possible to decode them with gr-ax100.

Decoding GOMX-1 telemetry

GOMX-1 is a 2U cubesat from GomSpace that was launched in November 2013 into a sun-synchronous orbit. As far as I know, it was the first satellite with an ADS-B receiver payload. It transmits telemetry on the 70cm Amateur band, including some data from the ADS-B receiver, as GOMX-3 does. Some Amateurs, including me, had tried to decode its telemetry on several occasions, without success. GOMX-3 will decay in about 4 weeks, as it was launched from the ISS on October 2015. Therefore, it now becomes more interesting to decode GOMX-1, which is in a longer term orbit. After one more serious try, I’ve been able to decode the telemetry. This is the first time that an Amateur decodes telemetry from GOMX-1 completely. The decoder code can be found in gr-satellites and gr-ax100, including an example wav file in gr-ax100/examples/gomx-1.wav.