Software – Daniel Estévez

BPSK radar received through Meridian 8

Ever since SETI Insitute published the news of a possible signal received from Proxima Centauri in some of the Parkes telescope recordings at 982 MHz, Scott Tilley VE7TIL has taken up the interest to search and catalogue the satellites that transmit on this band (specially old, forgotten and zombie satellites). His idea is to try to see if this candidate signal can be explained as interference from some satellite.

This has led him to discover some signals coming from satellites on a Molniya orbit. After examination with the Allen Telescope Array of these signals, we confirmed that they came from wideband transponders (centre frequency around 995 MHz, 13 MHz width) on some of the Meridian Russian communications satellites (in particular Meridian 4 and 8, but also others).

These transponders show all sorts of terrestrial signals that are relayed as unintended traffic through the transponder. By measuring Doppler we know that the uplink is somewhere around 700 or 800 MHz. We have found some OFDM-like signals that seem to be NB-IoT. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to do anything useful with them, maybe because there are several signals overlapping on the same frequency. We also found a wideband FM signal containing music and announcements in Turkmen, which later turned out to be the audio subcarrier of a SECAM analogue TV channel from Turkmenistan.

A few days ago, Scott detected a pulsed strong signal through the transponder of the Meridians at a downlink frequency of 994.2 MHz. He did an IQ recording of this signal on the downlink of Meridian 8. It turns out that this signal is a BPSK pulse radar. In this post I do a detailed analysis of the radar waveform using this recording.

Decoding the NEXUS π/4-DQPSK signal

NEXUS, also called FO-99, is a Japanese Amateur satellite built by Nihon University and JAMSAT. It was launched on January 2019, and one of its interesting features is a π/4-DQPSK high-speed transmitter for the 435 MHz Amateur satellite band.

I was always interested in implementing a decoder for this satellite, due to its unusual modulation, but the technical information that is publicly available is scarce, so I never set to do it. A few days ago, Andrei Kopanchuk UZ7HO asked me a question about the Reed-Solomon code used in this satellite. He was working on a decoder for this satellite, and had some extra documentation. This renewed my interest in building a decoder for this satellite.

With some help from Andy regarding the symbol mapping for the π/4-DQPSK constellation, I have made a decoder GNU Radio flowgraph that I have added to gr-satellites.

Decoding AMICal Sat in-orbit images

Back in March, I was helping Julien Nicolas F4HVX to test the S-band image transmitter of AMICal Sat before launch. In my post back then, I explained that AMICal Sat uses a Nordic Semiconductor nRF24L01+ 2.4GHz FSK transceiver chip to transmit Shockburst packets at 1Mbaud. I also explained how the Onyx EV76C664 CMOS image sensor works and how to process raw images.

AMICal Sat was finally launched on 2020-09-03, and since them the satellite team has been busy trying to downlink some images, both using the UHF transmitter (which uses the same protocol as Światowid) and the S-band transmitter. This has proven a bit difficult because the ADCS of the satellite is not working, and the downlink protocols are not very robust.

Julien has been sending me recordings done by their groundstation in Russia with the hope that we could be able to decode some of the data. Before several failed attempts where we were hardly able to decode a few packets, we got a particularly good S-band recording done on 2020-10-05. Using that recording, I have been able to decode a full image.

Measuring Tianwen-1’s modulation

This is a post I had announced since I first described Tianwen-1’s modulation. Since we have very high SNR recordings of the Tianwen-1 low rate rate telemetry signal made with the 20m dish in Bochum observatory, it is interesting to make detailed measurements of the modulation parameters. In fact, there is something curious about the way the modulation is implemented in the spacecraft’s transmitter. This analysis will show it clearly, but I will reserve the details for later in the post.

Here I will be using a recording that already appeared in a previous post. It was made on 2020-07-26 07:47:20 UTC in Bochum shortly after the switch to the high gain antenna, so the SNR is fantastic. The recording was done at 2.5Msps, and the spectrum can be seen below. The asymmetry (especially around +1MHz) might be due to the receive chain.

The signal is residual carrier phase modulation, with 16348 baud BPSK data on a 65536Hz square wave subcarrier. There is also a 500kHz ranging tone.

Decoding Mars 2020

Mars 2020, NASA’s latest mission to Mars, was launched a couple weeks ago. However, with all the Tianwen-1 work down the pipeline, until now I haven’t had time to dedicate an appropriate post to this mission (though I showed some sneak peek on Twitter). This mission consists of a rover and helicopter (a real novelty in space exploration). Both were launched with the cruise stage and the entry, descent and landing system on July 30 from Cape Canaveral, an are currently on their transfer orbit to Mars, as Tianwen-1 and Emirates Mars Mission.

In this post I will be working with some recordings made by AMSAT-DL using the 20m radio telescope at Bochum’s observatory. These feature the low rate safe mode telemetry, which was very strong and caused some anecdotes as it saturated some NASA DSN receivers, and the nominal 10kbps telemetry signal that was switched on later. Here I will describe the modulation and coding, giving GNU Radio decoders, and also take a look at the data. r00t.cz has also written a post where he shows similar information.

Tianwen-1 high speed data signal

In a previous post I talked about how the high data rate signal of Tianwen-1 can be used to replay recorded telemetry. I did an analysis of the telemetry transmitted over the high speed data signal on 2020-07-30 and showed how to interpret the ADCS data, but left the detailed description of the modulation and coding for a future post.

Here I will talk about the modulation and coding, and how the signal switches from the ordinary low rate telemetry to the high speed signal. I also give GNU Radio decoder flowgraphs, tianwen1_hsd.grc, which works with the 8192 bit frames, and tianwen1_hsd_shortframes.grc, which works with the 2048 bit short frames.

Tianwen-1 telemetry: framing and data

This is a follow-up to my previous post, where I explained the modulation and coding of Tianwen-1’s telemetry. In this post I will explain the framing structures and the data contained in the telemetry (though we only understand a few of the telemetry channels). Most of what I’m going to explain here was found first by r00t.cz and is already presented in his Tianwen-1 page. In this post I’ll try to give a bit more detail (especially for those not so familiar with the CCSDS protocols) and some Python code for those interested in digging into the data.

Tianwen-1 telemetry: modulation and coding

As promised in this post, I will now speak about how to demodulate the Tianwen-1 telemetry signal. This post will deal with demodulation and FEC decoding. The structure of the frames will be explained in the next post. In this post I also give a fully working GNU Radio decoder that can store frames in the format used by the orbit state vector extraction Python script.

BY02 telemetry beacon

BY02 (also known as BY70-2) is an Amateur cubesat by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and Beijing Bayi High School. It was launched on July 3 on a CZ-4B rocket from Taiyuan together with a Gaofen Earth observation satellite. BY02 is intended as a replacement for BY70-1, which was launched on 2016-12-28 and was placed on a short-lived orbit that decayed in a few months because of a launch problem.

Today, Wei Mingchuan BG2BHC announced on Twitter at 09:14 UTC that BY02’s beacon was on and would be left on at least until 12:50 UTC. I believe that this is the first time that the beacon has been on for an extended period of time, since during the early operations the beacon was only active on passes over China.

Since at 11:39 UTC there was a good pass over Spain, I went outside with my handheld Arrow 7 element yagi to do a recording. This post is an in-depth analysis of this recording and includes an explanation of the coding and telemetry format used by BY02.

gr-satellites FSK BER

A few months ago I talked about BER simulations of the gr-satellites demodulators. In there, I showed the BER curves for the BPSK and FSK demodulators that are included in gr-satellites, and gave some explanation about why the current FSK demodulator is far from ideal. Yesterday I was generating again these BER plots to check that I hadn’t broken anything after some small improvements. I was surprised to find that the FSK BER curve I got was much worse than the one in the old post.