Software – Page 19 – Daniel Estévez

Introducing gr-satellites

This post is to present my gr-satellites project. The goal of this project is to make a collection of GNUradio decoders for the telemetry of different satellites. The decoders support submitting telemetry in real time to the PE0SAT telemetry server. Another goal is that the decoders are as easy to use as possible, to try to make more people interested in receiving digital telemetry from satellites and collaborating in online telemetry submission.

The decoders can be used with the Gqrx SDR software, using its UDP audio streaming capabilities. This is the easiest way to use the decoders. It is also possible to use the GNUradio frontends in the companion project gr-frontends. These support several different SDR hardware, WAV and IQ recordings, and conventional receivers connected through a soundcard. They are design to be flexible and to allow its use in headless and automated receiving configurations.

The long-term goal of this project is to provide an alternative software chain to the UZ7HO soundmodem, AGW packet engine and DK3WN telemetry forwarder. The use of GNUradio makes these decoders more configurable and flexible and eases programming decoders for non-AX.25 satellites, which usually employ strong forward error correction.

Currently, the satellites supported by gr-satellites are 3CAT-2, AAUSAT-4 and GOMX-3. I plan to continue adding support for more satellites in the future.

Telemetry format of 3CAT-2

The team from the NanoSat Lab in Universidad Politècnica de Catalunya have published a telemetry analyser for 3CAT-2. This analyser is designed to connect to a TCP server and get the AX.25 frames in KISS format.

The telemetry format is rather simple, as one can see by looking at the PrintBeacon() function in 3cat2_telemetry.c. As I imagined, the contents of each beacon are just the numerical values of several telemetry channels written in ASCII. For example:

3 7781 0245 07 06	1 0 3.5e-01 2.5e-01 1.6e-01 6.8e-09 1.2e-09 1.8e-08

All the fields are separated by a space, except the 5th and 6th fields, which are separated by a tab. The content of the first 7 fields is as follows:

Mode. Possible values: 1 survival mode, 2 sun-safe mode, 3 nominal mode, 4 TX communication incoming (data downlink), 5 RX communications (command uplink), 6 and 7 payload mode.
Battery voltage in mV. In the example 7.781V.
Current consumption in mA. In the example 245mA.
EPS temperature (probably in ºC). In the example 7ºC.
Antenna temperature (probably in ºC). In the example 6ºC.
Status of the ADCS system. 0 means detumbling enabled. 1 means SS-nominal.
Control flag of the ADCS routine. Possible values: 0 automatic, 1 manual

The next 3 fields are floating point numbers. If detumbling is enabled, they correspond to magnetomer values in nT for the axes X, Y and Z respectively. If detumbling is not enabled, they correspond to the sun vector, axes X, Y and Z.

The last 3 fields correspond to the control voltages for axes X, Y and Z, regardless of whether detumbling is enabled or not.

Of course, the telemetry format is so easy that it can even be parsed with a “one-line” awk script:

 strings sats/3cat2-20160824-pe0sat.kiss | awk '{if ($1==1) printf "Survival"; if ($1==2) printf "Sun-safe"; if ($1==3) printf "Nominal"; if ($1==4) printf "TX"; if ($1==5) printf "RX"; if ($1>=6) printf "Payload"; printf "  %.2fV  %dmA  EPS: %2dºC  Ant: %2dºC  ", $2*1e-3, $3, $4, $5; if ($7==0) {printf "ADCS auto  "} else {printf "ADCS manual  "}; if ($6==0) {printf "Detumbling  (%f,%f,$f) nT", $8, $9, $10} else {printf "SS-nominal  Sun: (%.2f,%.2f,%.2f)", $8, $9, $10}; printf "  Control (%.1e,%.1e,%.1e)V\n", $11, $12, $13}'

which shows the following output:

Nominal  8.26V  233mA  EPS:  4ºC  Ant:  8ºC  ADCS auto  SS-nominal  Sun: (0.49,0.42,1.00)  Control (6.9e-09,1.7e-09,1.7e-08)V
Nominal  8.28V  221mA  EPS:  5ºC  Ant:  8ºC  ADCS auto  SS-nominal  Sun: (0.16,0.87,0.57)  Control (6.7e-09,1.4e-09,1.7e-08)V
Nominal  8.29V  245mA  EPS:  5ºC  Ant:  8ºC  ADCS auto  SS-nominal  Sun: (0.26,0.96,0.46)  Control (6.7e-09,1.4e-09,1.7e-08)V
Nominal  8.30V  257mA  EPS:  5ºC  Ant:  8ºC  ADCS auto  SS-nominal  Sun: (0.62,0.78,0.42)  Control (6.7e-09,1.4e-09,1.7e-08)V
Nominal  8.30V  257mA  EPS:  5ºC  Ant:  9ºC  ADCS auto  SS-nominal  Sun: (0.64,0.72,0.49)  Control (6.7e-09,1.4e-09,1.7e-08)V
Nominal  8.30V  245mA  EPS:  5ºC  Ant:  9ºC  ADCS auto  SS-nominal  Sun: (0.64,0.66,0.59)  Control (6.8e-09,1.5e-09,1.7e-08)V
Nominal  8.30V  245mA  EPS:  5ºC  Ant:  9ºC  ADCS auto  SS-nominal  Sun: (0.60,0.60,0.71)  Control (6.8e-09,1.5e-09,1.7e-08)V
Nominal  8.30V  245mA  EPS:  5ºC  Ant:  9ºC  ADCS auto  SS-nominal  Sun: (0.54,0.54,0.86)  Control (6.8e-09,1.6e-09,1.7e-08)V
Nominal  8.29V  245mA  EPS:  5ºC  Ant: 10ºC  ADCS auto  SS-nominal  Sun: (0.45,0.49,1.00)  Control (6.9e-09,1.7e-09,1.7e-08)V
Nominal  8.28V  245mA  EPS:  5ºC  Ant: 10ºC  ADCS auto  SS-nominal  Sun: (0.32,0.44,1.00)  Control (6.9e-09,1.7e-09,1.7e-08)V

The KISS file in question was obtained from the recording on 24/08/2016 at 10:54 by PE0SAT that I mentioned at the end of a previous post.

Many thanks to Juan Fran Muñoz and the rest of the NanoSat Lab team for publishing the telemetry analyser and sharing details about the satellite and the operations.

Decoding packets from 3CAT2

On 15th August, a Chinese CZ-2D rocket launched three satellites from Juiuquan (Mongolia). The main payload was the Chinese satellite QSS, designed to do some experiments in quantum communications and entanglement. As anything that has the word quantum on it, this satellite even made it to the mainstream news in Spain. The rocket also launched Lixing 1, another Chinese satellite which will research the upper atmosphere, and 3CAT2, from the Universidad Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain).

3CAT2’s main payload is a GNSS reflectrometer designed to measure the altitude of the Earth and map the oceans. This means that it uses reflections of satellite navigation signals off the surface of the earth and sea to perform mapping. It will mainly use the L1 and L2 signals from GPS, but it can also work with Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou signals. It also carries a prototype of a magnetometer designed for the eLISA project. This project consists in setting up a laser interferometer in space to observe gravity waves. It is roughly the same as the Earth-based LIGO, that recently confirmed the first detections of gravity waves. However, since eLISA will be in space, its laser arms will much longer than LIGO’s. This permits to study much lower frequencies than it’s possible Earth-based interferometers.

3CAT2 has a downlink in the Amateur 2m band, at 145.970MHz, and transmits 9600bps BPSK. It also has a faster BPSK downlink in the S-band, presumably at 2401MHz (inside the Amateur 13cm band). The days following 3CAT2’s launch I tried to receive its VHF signal, without any luck. I have been in contact with other Amateurs who also listened and didn’t hear anything.

This morning, I’ve received email from Scott K4KDR telling me that he has heard the satellite for the first time and he has managed to do a recording, but he is unable to decode the data.

We where unsure about which encoding that 3CAT2 is using. It could be AX.25, or some custom protocol using FEC. As far as I know, the only other satellite that transmits 9k6 BPSK in the Amateur bands is LilacSat-2, which uses strong FEC. Nevertheless, I’ve taken a good look at Scott’s recording and I’ve been able to decode one packet. This is, as far as I’m aware, the first decoding of 3CAT2 by an Amateur operator.

Receiving the Vaisala RS92-SGP radiosonde launched from Madrid-Barajas

Each day, at 01:00UTC and 11:00UTC a Vaisala RS92-SGP radiosonde is launched from Madrid-Barajas airport. This is a small electronics package tied to a helium balloon that ascends up to between 24 and 28km high before bursting and descending on parachute. It is designed to measure atmospheric parameters on its way up. It includes temperature, pressure and humidity sensors, as well as a GPS receiver. The launch on Wednesdays at 11:00UTC also includes a plug-in ozone sensor (which is a much larger and more expensive package). The data is transmitted at 403MHz using Manchester-encoded 4800bps GMSK and protected using Reed-Solomon. You can find more information about the RS92-SGP model in its technical datasheet and about the launches at Madrid-Barajas and other launches in Spain in the Spanish AIP Section 5.3 (other activities of a dangerous nature). Also, there is somebody who feeds the radiosonde data into the APRS network using SM2APRS, so you can track the launches by following OKER-11 on aprs.fi.

Usually, the Sondemonitor software is used to receive and plot the parameters measured by the radiosonde and track the GPS data. Of course, this program is very nice and complete, but it is shareware, costs 25€ and runs only in Windows. I wanted to try if it is possible to track the GPS data in Linux using free software.

Using the CC1101 and Beaglebone black for IP traffic on 70cm

Lately, I have been experimenting with using a CC1101 chip together with a Beaglebone black single board ARM computer to transmit IP traffic over the 70cm Amateur band. There has been a similar project from OEVSV, but I’ve never seen this project reach a final form. Edouard F4EXB has some code that uses the Raspberry Pi instead. Presumably, this will suffer from problems when using the higher data rates supported by the CC1101, as his software is not real-time.

The goal of my project is to build an affordable 70cm IP transceiver with a power of a few Watts. This can be used in the Hamnet Amateur Radio IP network. The modulation should not use more than a couple of hundreds of kHz’s of spectrum, as it doesn’t seem very sensible to take up much more spectrum in the 70cm band. Although the usual maximum bandwidth in the 70cm band is 20kHz, the IARU R1 bandplan allows for wideband experiments around 434.000MHz. A data rate of 128kbps with MSK modulation seems about right, as it uses roughly 200kHz of spectrum. Further on-the-air tests will perhaps change these parameters a bit.

KISS, HDLC, AX.25 and friends

A while ago, I uploaded my gr-kiss out-of-tree GNUradio module to Github. This is a set of blocks to handle KISS, HDLC and AX.25, which are the protocols used in amateur packet radio. There are several other OOT modules that do similar things, but I didn’t like the functionality of them very much. While programming this module, I’ve also noted that the documentation for these protocols is not so good sometimes. Here I’ll give a brief description of the protocols and explain how everything works together.

GOMX-3 data download

This weekend, Mike DK3WN caught GOMX-3 downloading a good amount of data. See his post here. This data consists mainly of the satellite retransmitting a lot of beacons that were generated during the last 16 hours or so.

GomSpace has recently released a complete parser for GOMX-3 beacons of type 1 0 (these are the beacons that contain ADS-B data). I have already incorporated this code into my gr-ax100 fork.

The binary data in KISS format (almost 250KB) and the parsed beacon data received during this data download is in gist. Probably the most interesting thing is the ADS-B data. Below you can see all the aircraft on the map. Clicking on any of them will show the details for that aircraft.

Since the orbit of GOMX-3 has an inclination of 51.6º, the satellite doesn’t usually detect aircraft above 55ºN or below 55ºS. GomSpace has an image which shows lots of flights received with GOMX-3. There, the major air routes and hubs are apparent.

LilacSat-2 subaudio telemetry

Yesterday, the FM repeater on the Amateur satellite LilacSat-2 was active. I’ve talked about LilacSat-2 before, but so far I hadn’t made any recordings containing subaudio telemetry. While contacting several Spanish stations (EA5TT, EA1JM and EA1IW) throughout the pass, I made an IQ recording to analyse the telemetry later. Here I take a look at the telemetry format and the decoded data.

Scramblers and their implementation in GNU Radio

A scrambler is a function that is applied to a sequence of data before transmitting with the goal of making this data more “random-like”. For instance, scrambling avoids long runs of the bits 0 or 1 only, which may make the receiver loose synchronization or cause spectral concentration of the signal. The receiver applies the inverse function, which is called descrambler, to recover the original data. The documentation for the scrambler blocks in GNU Radio is not very good and one may need to take a look at the implementation of these blocks to get their parameters right. Here, I’ll try to explain a bit of the mathematics behind scramblers and the peculiarities of their implementation in GNU Radio.

Decoding packets from GOMX-3: modulation and coding

Recently, Mike DK3WN pointed me to some decoder software for the satellite GOMX-3. This satellite is a 3U cubesat from GomSpace and transmits in the 70cm Amateur band. It has an ADS-B receiver on board, as well as an L-band SDR. As far as I know, no Amateur has decoded packets from this satellite previously, and Mike had some problems running the decoder software. I have taken a look at the software and tried my best to decode some packets from GOMX-3. So far, I have been able to do Reed-Solomon decoding and get CSP packets. However, I don’t have the precise details for the beacon format yet. Here, I describe all of my findings.