Lately, I have been trying to make an amplitude and phase calibration of my Hermes-Lite 2 beta2 in order to use Linrad’s smart noise blanker. This is quite a task because Linrad doesn’t support the Hermes-Lite 2 directly. Today I’ve finally managed to do it. Here I describe all my setup and calibration results.
Posts
Waterfalls from the EAPSK63 contest
Last weekend, I recorded the full EAPSK63 contest in the 40m band with the goal of monitoring IMD levels. I made a 48kHz IQ recording spanning the full 24 contest hours (from 16:00 UTC on Saturday to 16:00 UTC on Sunday). This week I’ve been playing with making waterfall plots from the recording. These are very interesting, showing patterns in propagation and contest activity. Here I show some of the waterfalls I’ve obtained, together with the Python code used to compute them.
Monitoring IMD levels in the EAPSK63 contest
This weekend I have recorded the full EAPSK63 Spanish PSK63 contest in the 40m band with the goal of playing back the recording later and reporting the stations showing excessively high IMD levels. In PSK contests, it is usual to see terribly distorted signals, which are the result of reckless operating techniques and stations which are setup inadequately. Contest rules don’t help much, as they are usually too weak to prevent distorted signals from interfering other participants. Amateurs should take care and strive to produce a signal as clean as possible. For instance, in the US, Part 97 101 a) states that “each amateur station must be operated in accordance with good engineering and good amateur practice”. Here I describe the signal processing done in this study and list a “hall of shame” of the worst stations I have spotted in my recording. I will notify by email the contest manager and all the stations in this list with the hope that the situation improves in the future.
Sending data from GNU Radio into Linrad using the network
During the last few days I’ve been experimenting with feeding signals from GNU Radio into Linrad using Linrad’s network protocol. Linrad has several network protocols designed to share data between different instances of Linrad, but generally these protocols are only supported by Linrad itself. The only other example I know of is MAP65, which can receive noise-blanked data from Linrad using the timf2 format.
The result of these experiments is a GNU Radio out-of-tree module called gr-linrad which allows to send data from GNU Radio and receive the data in Linrad. Currently, gr-linrad only supports sending a one-channel complex IQ signal using the raw 24 bit format, but I’ll probably add more options in the future. The intended application of gr-linrad is to easily add support for SDR hardware to Linrad. Usually GNU Radio has support for most SDR hardware in the market, perhaps through osmocom or other libraries. Linrad has support for a good amount of SDR hardware, but there are some notable exceptions of unsupported hardware, such as the HackRF One. I also want to use my Hermes-Lite 2.0 beta2 in Linrad, and this seems the easiest way to do it.
Another possible use of gr-linrad is as an instrumentation for any kind of GNU Radio flowgraph. It is very easy to stream data into Linrad, so it can be used as a very nice waterfall display or to do any sort of signal processing, such as noise blanking or adaptive polarization. Here I describe how to get the test flowgraph in gr-linrad working and some aspects of the network protocol.
GNU Radio decoder for AO-73
During the last few days, I have been talking with Edson PY2SDR about using GNU Radio to decode digital telemetry from AO-73 (FUNcube-1) and other FUNcube satellites. I hear that in Virginia Tech Groundstation they have a working GNU Radio decoder, but it seems they never published it.
The modulation that the FUNcube satellites use is DBPSK at 1200baud. The coding is based on a CCSDS concatenated code with a convolutional code and Reed-Solomon, but it makes extensive use of interleaving to combat the fading caused by the spin of the spacecraft. This system was originally designed by Phil Karn KA9Q for AO-40. Phil has a description of the AO-40 FEC system in his web and there is another nice description by James Miller G3RUH.
I took a glance at this documents and noted that it would be a nice and easy exercise to implement a decoder in GNU Radio, as I have most of the building blocks that are needed already working as part of gr-satellites. Today, I have implemented an out-of-tree module with a decoder for the AO-40 FEC in gr-ao40. There is another gr-ao40 project out there, but it seems incomplete. For instance, it doesn’t have any code to search for the syncword. I have also added decoders for AO-73 and UKube-1 to gr-satellites.
The signal processing in gr-ao40 is as described in the following diagram taken from G3RUH’s paper.
First, the distributed syncword is searched using a C++ custom block. It is possible to set a threshold in this block to account for several bit errors in the syncword. De-interleaving is done using another C++ custom block. For Viterbi decoding, I have used the “FEC Async Decoder” block from GNU Radio, since I like to use stock blocks when possible. Then, CCSDS descrambling is done with a hierarchical block from gr-satellites. Finally, the interleaved Reed-Solomon decoders are implemented in a C++ custom blocks that uses Phil Karn’s libfec.
The complete FEC decoder is implemented as a hierarchical block as show in the figure below.
An erasure code based on Vandermonde matrices
I’ve been looking at an erasure code by Luigi Rizzo which is based on Vandermonde matrices, since this code is used in Outernet. In fact, it is the code implemented by the zfec library. Luigi Rizzo describes his code in a paper from 1997, but the paper can be very confusing and misleading because it describes the mathematics in very little detail. I needed to go to the source code to understand how it works. Actually, the idea behind this code is very simple. Here I do a mathematical description of the code and show that it is the same as a Reed-Solomon code. This is rather weird, because Luigi Rizzo makes no mention of Reed-Solomon codes, which were first described in 1960.
free-outernet gets LDPC decoding
In my previous post I talked about some small updates made by George Hopkins to my free-outernet project. In fact, George has been reverse engineering the ondd binary quite in depth and he has been able to reverse engineer the LDPC code which is used for file FEC. This solves a long-standing issue of free-outernet. Formerly, LDPC decoding was not implemented, so to recover a file successfully all the file blocks had to be received correctly. Now, with LDPC decoding the file can be recovered even if some of the file blocks are lost. Thus, the performance of free-outernet in this aspect should now be the same as the performance of the closed source ondd binary included in the official Outernet receiver. Many thanks to George, as this is a substantial improvement of free-outernet. Here I describe the latest changes made by George in free-outernet.
Updated format for Outernet LDP protocol
After my talk in 33C3, George Hopkins has been doing some further reverse engineering of the Outernet protocols. By looking at the ondd binary, he has discovered that the length of the LDP header is not 6 bytes, but rather 4 bytes. He has sent a pull request with these changes. I have already merged it into free-outernet.
Thus, the last field of the LDP header as described in my previous post, which was formerly known as “B field”, gets now included in the payload of the package. The former “A field” is now the only field that identifies the port or service, and therefore it is now known as “type”. For file and FEC blocks, this change is small, because the former “B field” was always 0, so it gets incorporated into the “file id” field of the payload, which is now 24 bits long instead of 16 bits. For time packets it provides a nice way to interpret the packet as a variable record field structure. This interpretation now explains all the contents of the time packet.
After reviewing and merging George’s changes and while I still have these details fresh in my mind, I have updated the slides I used in my 33C3 talk to reflect these changes. These are the updated slides.
Open telecommand for BY70-1
Recently, Wei BG2BHC has published instructions for the use of BY70-1’s camera by Amateurs. Essentially, there are three commands that can be used: 0x00 to take a picture and send it, 0x55 to take a picture and store it in memory, and 0xaa to send the picture stored in memory. He also gives the modulation and coding details for the commands. They use AX.25 with 1000baud FM-AFSK with tones at 1000Hz and 1833.33Hz. The AX.25 frames are UI frames containing a single byte with the command (0x00, 0x55 or 0xaa as described above). For ease of use, he also gives WAV recordings of the three commands, so they can be played back easily into an FM transmitter by any Amateur. Here I look at the contents of these WAV files and how to process and create this kind of packets.
Coding for HIT satellites (and other CCSDS satellites)
The Harbin Institute of Technology satellites LilacSat-2, BY70-1 and the upcoming LilacSat-1 all use a concatenated code with an \(r=1/2, k=7\) convolutional code and a (255,223) Reed-Solomon code according to the CCSDS TM Synchronization and Channel Coding blue book specifications. The GNU Radio decoder gr-lilacsat by Wei BG2BHC includes a custom implementation of the relevant part of the CCSDS stack, probably ported into GNU Radio from some other software.
Recently, I have been working on decoding KS-1Q and I’ve seen that it uses the same CCSDS coding as the HIT satellites. This has made me realise that most of this CCSDS coding can be processed using stock GNU Radio blocks, without the need for custom blocks. The only exception is Reed-Solomon decoding. This can be done easily with gr-libfec, which provides an easy interface from GNU Radio to Phil Karn’s libfec. Here I look at the details of the CCSDS coding and how to process it with GNU Radio. I’ve updated the decoders in gr-satellites to use this kind of processing. I’ll also talk about the small advantages of doing it in this way versus using the custom implementation in gr-lilacsat.