You might remember that back in July I made a recording of the DME ground-to-air and air-to-ground frequencies for a nearby VOR-DME station. In that post, I performed a preliminary analysis of the recording. I mentioned that I was interested in measuring the delay between the signals received directly from the aircraft and the ground transponder replies, and match these to the aircraft trajectories. This post is focused on that kind of study. I will present a GNU Radio out-of-tree module gr-dme that I have written to detect and measure DME pulses, and show a Jupyter notebook where I match aircraft pulses with their corresponding ground transponder replies and compare the delays to those calculated from the aircraft positions given in ADS-B data.
Tag: ads-b
Aircraft reflections of a 2.3GHz beacon
A couple months ago, Andrés Calleja EB4FJV installed a 2.3GHz beacon in his home in Colmenar Viejo, Madrid. The beacon has 2W of power, radiates with an omnidirectional antenna in the vertical polarization, and transmits a tone and CW identification at the frequency 2320.865MHz.
Since Colmenar Viejo is only 10km away from Tres Cantos, where I live, I can receive the beacon with a very strong signal from home. The Madrid-Barajas airport is also quite near (15km to the threshold of runway 18R) and several departure and approach aircraft routes pass nearby, particularly those flying over the Colmenar VOR. Therefore, it is quite easy to see reflections off aircraft when listening to the beacon.
On July 8 I did a recording of the beacon from 10:04 to 11:03 UTC from the countryside just outside Tres Cantos. In this post I will examine the aircraft reflections seen in the recording and match them with ADS-B aircraft position and velocity data obtained from adsbexchange.com. This will show the locations and trajectories which produce reflections strong enough to be detected.
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.
Decoding packets from GOMX-3: CSP packets
A few days ago, I talked about the modulation and coding used by the satellite GOMX-3. Here, I will look at the contents of the CSP packets transmitted by this satellite.