Daniel Estévez – Page 2 – Scientific & Technical Amateur Radio

July 21, 2020July 21, 2020

Galileo and GPS DOPs revisited

Back on January, I did a post with a simulation about the DOP distribution for the Galileo and GPS constellations. In there, I computed the DOP for a grid of points on the surface of the Earth and then plotted maps with the average and worst DOP. I used three different kinds of constellation definitions, both for Galileo and for GPS: the base constellation, which has 24 satellites in both cases; an expanded constellation, which in the case of Galileo adds 6 spares and in the case of GPS has 27 satellites as defined in the 2008 SPS performance standard; and a real life constellation taken from the almanac at the beginning of January.

Since I wrote that post, the 2020 SPS performance standard came out in April. This defines a new expandable reference constellation of 30 satellites. Besides the three expandable slots on planes B, D and F, three new expandable slots are added on planes A, C and E, so that now there is one expandable slot per plane. All the RAANs and mean anomalies corresponding to the slots have also been updated, since the constellation is now referenced to an epoch on 2016 (the previous one had an epoch on 1993).

I have now run again my simulations using the 30 satellite expandable constellation, which provides a closer model to the real life constellation. Here I show briefly the results.

July 12, 2020July 12, 2020

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.

July 4, 2020July 6, 2020

RTCM clock corrections for Galileo E24

In my previous post I looked at the BGDs and related topics for the Galileo satellites. We saw that satellite E24 has atypically large BGDs, but everything else seems fine and consistent with that satellite. However, Bert Hubert from galmon.eu shows that several RTCM sources broadcast a clock correction of around -5ns for E24. Here we look at the possible causes for that correction, and discuss whether it might be problematic.

July 1, 2020July 4, 2020

About Galileo BGDs

A few days ago, Bert Hubert, from galmon.eu noticed that Galileo satellite E24 was somewhat special because it had unusually large BGDs. This raised a number of questions, such as what is the physical interpretation of BGDs, what they have to do with broadcast clock models, and so on.

In this post I will explain a few basic facts about BGDs and related topics, following an approach that is perhaps different to that of the usual GNSS literature, and also study the current values for the Galileo constellation. People who know all the details about the BGDs or who just want to see a few pretty plots can skip all the first section of the post.

June 28, 2020June 28, 2020

Receiving Arecibo in HF

The well known Arecibo observatory, besides being used as a radiotelescope and planetary radar, has a powerful HF transmitter that is used to artificially excite the ionosphere, in order to study ionospheric effects using 430MHz incoherent scatter radar. More information about this can be found in the HF proposals page of the observatory web, and in this poster that details the characteristics of the HF facilities.

The HF transmitter has a power of up to 600kW and can use the frequencies 5.1MHz and 8.175MHz. At those frequencies, the dish has a gain of 22dB (13º beamwidth) and 25.5dB (8.5deg) respectively, so the power that is beamed up to the ionosphere is huge. The 430MHz incoherent scatter radar is even more powerful, with up to 2MW. For an introduction to ionospheric incoherent scatter radar, see this lecture by Juha Vierinen, which explains why such huge powers are needed, due to the very weak radar return of ionospheric plasma.

A few days ago, on Wednesday 24, Chris Fallen tweeted that the Arecibo transmitter was active at 5.1MHz. According to the telescope schedule, which can be seen in the figure below (click on the image to view it in full size), there was an experiment that involved the HF transmitter on 2020-06-24 from 18:00 to 22:00 UTC, on 2020-06-25 from 17:00 to 21:00 UTC, and on 2020-06-26 from 17:00 to 21:00 UTC.

June 26, 2020June 26, 2020

ESA NEOCC riddle 1

A few weeks ago, the ESA Nearth Earth Object Coordination Center started a series of NEOCC riddles about Near Earth Object orbits and related topics. The first riddle was about orbits with a peculiar characteristic: they spend 50% of the time inside some fixed radius from the Sun (1.3au in the riddle), and the remaining 50% of the time outside this radius. It was published on June 4. Shortly after that I submitted my solution. The deadline for sending solutions ended yesterday, so today NEOCC has published their solution together with the list of people that solved the riddle correctly. In this post I publish my solution and make some additional comments.

June 25, 2020June 25, 2020

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.

June 22, 2020June 22, 2020

On the DSCS-III X-band 1kbaud beacon

Over the last few days, I’ve been looking at some recordings of the DSCS-III A-3 X-band beacon made by Scott Tilley VE7TIL. The beacon has a central carrier, which is BPSK modulated at 800baud and whose details we know pretty well due to this Master’s thesis by James Coppola. It also has two subcarriers modulated with 1kbaud BPSK of which we know very little. In this post I explain what I’ve been able to find about the data in this 1kbaud subcarriers (which isn’t that much, to be honest).

June 21, 2020June 21, 2020

Reverse-engineering the DSCS-III convolutional encoder

One thing I left open in my post yesterday was the convolutional encoder used for FEC in the DSCS-III X-band beacon data. I haven’t seen that the details of the convolutional encoder are described in Coppola’s Master’s thesis, but in a situation such as this one, it is quite easy to use some linear algebra to find the convolutional encoder specification. Here I explain how it is done.

June 20, 2020June 20, 2020

A look at the DSCS-III X-band beacon

The DSCS satellites are a constellation of US military communication satellites. While the constellation is old and it is being replaced by WGS, there are still several active DSCS-III satellites. A few days ago, Scott Tilley VE7TIL tweeted about the DSCS-III-A3 X-band beacon. The satellite DSCS-III-A3, also known as USA-167, is the second most recent DSCS-III satellite, having been launched in 2003. It has an X-band beacon at 7604.6MHz.

Scott’s tweets included a very impressive and interesting find: a Master’s thesis about a DSCS-III beacon decoder made by James Coppola in 1992. The thesis contains a wealth of information about the beacon, as well as the complete C source code for the decoder.

Scott has also been kind enough to share with me some recordings that he made of the beacon, so in this post I’ll be looking at these and how they relate to the information in the thesis.