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.
A year ago, I made a decoder for the AO-40 FEC. While AO-40 has been dead for many years, the same FEC system is used in AO-73 and the rest of the FUNcube satellites. This decoder was later included in gr-satellites and it is currently used in the decoders for AO-73, UKube-1 and Nayif-1.
When I implemented this FEC decoder, for simplicity I used a hard decision Viterbi decoder, since my main concern was to get all the system working. I always intended to replace this by a soft decision Viterbi decoder, but it seems that I forgot completely about it.
Now, while thinking about integrating gr-aausat (my AAUSAT-4 decoder OOT module) into gr-satellites and adding a soft Viterbi decoder for AAUSAT-4, I have remembered about this. While the decoder for AAUSAT-4 will have to wait, since I have found a bug in the GNU Radio Viterbi decoder that makes it segfault, I have already added a soft Viterbi AO-40 FEC decoder to the FUNcube decoders in gr-satellites.
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.
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.
PolyITAN-2-SAU decoder
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.
In my previous post, I talked about the coding used by the S-NET cubesats and the implementation of my decoder included in gr-satellites. The decoder was still missing a BCH decoder. I have now implemented a BCH decoder and included it in gr-satellites. Here I describe the details of this decoder.
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.
In January, I took a look at TY-2 telemetry. This is a Chinese cubesat that transmits 9k6 FSK telemetry in the 70cm Amateur band. In my previous post I tried to reverse engineer the packets from TY-2 and got as far as recognizing the syncword, and noting that the syncword is the same as the one sent by the GOMspace NanoCom AX100 transceiver. However, in all AX100 transceivers I had seen, the syncword was sent scrambled with a G3RUH scrambler, and TY-2 sent it unscrambled. This left me a bit puzzled. The payload seemed to be scrambled and I was unable to descramble it, preventing any further progress.
Since then, I have tried to get in contact with the satellite team to see if they could give me any additional information about TY-2 and its companion TY-6 (which uses the same format). Finally, the satellite team have answered me, giving me some details and confirming me that they use the AX100. This has allowed me to finish the decoder. An updated decoder is now available in gr-satellites. Thanks to BI1AEM for his help. Here I look at the specific details of the format used by TY-2.
In my post I explained that the LDPC code used in Outernet followed RFC5170, and I wondered whether it used the staircase scheme or the triangle scheme. I also commented that erasure decoding with an LDPC code (or any other linear code, actually) was mathematically equivalent to solving a linear system where the unknowns correspond to the erased symbols. I observed that the decoding function looked very different from this mathematical procedure, but should do more or less the same thing. Now I have read the decoder implementation carefully and I have the answer to both questions.
Many Amateur radio operators are familiar with the effects of the ionosphere at HF frequencies. However, the effects of the ionosphere are also noticeable at much higher frequencies. In particular, at L band, which is used by most satellite navigation systems. Thus, GNSS receivers can be used to measure ionospheric parameters. These measurements are usually distributed as TEC maps in IONEX files.
Here I describe some basic ionospheric physics, how a GNSS receiver can measure the ionosphere, and give some Python code to study TEC maps in IONEX files. Then I use TEC maps to study the CODAR ionospheric observations I did in December last year.
On January 28th, Tetsu JA0CAWreported on Twitter his reception of an unknown satellite. The time of reception was 2018-01-28 12:15 UTC and the frequency was around 435.525MHz. The time and frequency coincided with a PicSat pass over JA0CAW’s station in Japan. He provided an IQ recording of the signal. So far, the satellite that originated the signal has not been identified. Several people have tried to listen to this satellite again, but I haven’t seen any other reports. Doppler identification has not been attempted and it is perhaps unfeasible with the few packets in JA0CAW’s recording.
I have looked at the recording to try to identify the satellite. The modulation is easily seen to be BPSK at 9600baud. The signal presents a lot of fading, so demodulation without bit errors is difficult. There seems to be a scrambler in use. I’ve tried descrambling with G3RUH and CCSDS without any luck. I’ve also failed to identify a preamble or frame sync marker.
To look at the packets in more detail, I’ve resorted to do demodulation as postprocessing in a Jupyter Python notebook. The resulting notebook is here. It is written with detailed comments, so it can be of interest to anyone who wants to learn these techniques.
The only interesting piece of information that I’ve been able to extract from my analysis is that the bits in the packets present strong self-correlations at lags of 1920 bits (and multiples). This is 240 bytes, but I have no clue of what to make of this.
As always, I would be grateful if anyone can provide any additional information about this unknown satellite.
