Last Friday, an Electron rocket from Rocket Lab was launched from Mahia Launch Complex, New Zealand, carrying the ALE-2 microsatellite and 6 PocketQubes into a 400km polar orbit. Two of these PocketQubes are SMOG-P and ATL-1 from Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
They transmit in the 70cm Amateur satellite band, and although they have beeen successfully coordinated with IARU (see here and here), documentation about the protocols they use has not been published. There is some groundstation software available here, but the interesting part is implemented in the atlgnd_x86_64
and smogpgnd_x86_64
binary executables, for which source code is not available. As far as I know both satellites transmit using the same (or very similar) protocols.
In this post I describe my first attempts at reverse-engineering the transmissions of SMOG-P, with successful results. Preliminary support for decoding SMOG-P and ATL-1 has been added to gr-satellites in the maint-3.8 branch.