gnuradio – Page 7 – Daniel Estévez

Simulating the TED gain for a polyphase matched filter

Trying to improve the performance of the demodulators in gr-satellites, I am switching to the Symbol Sync GNU Radio block, which was introduced by Andy Walls in GRCon17. This block covers the functionality of all the other clock synchronization blocks, such as Polyphase Clock Sync and Clock Recovery MM, while fixing many bugs.

One of the new features of the Symbol Sync block is the ability to specify the gain of the timing error detector (TED) used in the clock recovery feedback loop. All the other blocks assumed unity gain, which simply causes the loop filter taps to be wrong. However, the TED gain needs to be calculated beforehand either by analysis or simulation, as it depends on the choice of TED, samples per symbol, pulse shaping, SNR and other.

While Andy shows how to use the Symbol Sync block as a direct replacement for the Polyphase Clock Sync block in his slides, he leaves the TED gain as one, since that is what the Polyphase Clock Sync block uses. In replacing the Polyphase Clock Sync block by Symbol Sync in gr-satellites, I wanted to use the correct TED gain, but I didn’t found anyone having computed it before. This post shows my approach at simulating the TED gain for polyphase matched filter with maximum likelyhood detector.

Decoding ESA Solar Orbiter

Solar Orbiter is an ESA Sun observation satellite that was launched on February 10 from Cape Canaveral, USA. It will perform detailed measurements of the heliosphere from close distances reaching down to around 60 solar radii.

As usual, Amateur observers have been interested in tracking this mission since launch, but apparently ESA refused to publish state vectors to aid them locate the spacecraft. However, 18 hours after launch, Solar Orbiter was found by Amateurs, first visually, and then by radio. Since then, it has been actively tracked by several Amateur DSN stations, which are publishing reception reports on Twitter and other media.

On February 13, the spacecraft deployed its high gain antenna. Since it is not so far from Earth yet, even stations with relatively small dishes are able to receive the data modulation on the X band downlink signal. Spectrum plots showing the sidelobes of this signal have been published in Twitter by Paul Marsh M0EYT, Ferruccio IW1DTU, and others.

I have used an IQ recording made by Paul on 2020-02-13 16:43:25 UTC at 8427.070MHz to decode the data transmitted by Solar Orbiter. In this post, I show the details.

Fourth alpha for gr-satellites 3

Shortly after releasing the third alpha, I have released today gr-satellites v3-alpha3, which is the fourth in the series of alphas of the future gr-satellites v3. This release focuses on a new file and image receiver framework that tries to give a general way of reassembling files transmitted in chunks using different protocols.

Third alpha for gr-satellites 3

gr-satellites v3 is a large refactor of the gr-satellites codebase that I introduced in September. Since then, I have been working and releasing alphas to showcase the new features and get feedback from the community. Today I have released the third alpha in the series: v3-alpha2.

Each of the alphas has focused on a different topic or feature, and v3-alpha2 focuses on extending the number of satellites supported and bringing back most of the satellites supported in gr-satellites v2. Whereas previous alphas supported only a few different satellites, this alpha supports a large number. Therefore, I think that this is the first gr-satellites v3 release that is really useful. I expect that interested people will be able to use v3-alpha2 as a replacement of gr-satellites v2 in their usual activities.

In this post, I explain the main features that this alpha brings. For the basic usage of gr-satellites v3, please refer to the post about the second alpha.

First tests of a narrowband data modem for QO-100

Since a while ago, I have had the idea to design a data modem for the NB transponder of QO-100 (Es’hail 2). The main design criteria of this modem is that it should fit in a bandwidth of 2.7kHz and be able to work at a signal power equal to that of the transponder BPSK beacon, since these are the bandwidth and power constraints when using the NB transponder.

Currently, the following modes are used for medium speed data (understood as a few kbps) on the NB transponder. First, there are the FreeDV modes, whose use has been covered in this Lime microsystems community post. Most of these modes use OFDM or multi-carrier modems and are designed having HF fading channels in mind. These don’t give good performance over the QO-100 transponder, since the frequency instabilities of the transmitters and receivers give problems with OFDM modems. A single carrier modem is much better. David Rowe VK5DGR has made some modifications to the FreeDV 2020 modem to improve performance over QO-100, and it certainly works quite well, but better results can be obtained with a single carrier modem.

There are some people using DRM for DSSTV. This is also an OFDM modem intended for HF, and the symbol time is quite long, so the frequency instabilities can give problems. Finally, there is KG-STV, which was relatively unpopular before QO-100 but it is seeing a lot of use due to its good performance. It uses a single carrier MSK modem. This is probably the most popular medium speed mode on the NB transponder, but it is only 1200bps.

One important characteristic of the NB transponder is that there is a lot of SNR available. The rule is that no signal should be stronger than the beacons, but the BPSK beacon has a CN0 of around 54dB as received in my station. It is also not difficult (in terms of uplink EIRP) to achieve the same power as the beacon. Therefore, it is a reasonable assumption that stations interested in using a medium speed data modem will adjust their uplink power to be as strong as the BPSK beacon. I already hinted at what is possible with such a strong signal in this post.

I have decided to do some preliminary tests to check the performance of a 2kbaud 8PSK signal over the NB transponder. This post summarizes my results. The material for the post can be found in the qo100-modem Github repository.

Measuring the Allan deviation of a GPSDO with an SDR

A few days ago I tried to measure the QO-100 NB transponder LO stability using my DF9NP 10MHz GPSDO. It turned out that my GPSDO was less stable than the LO, so my measurements showed nothing about the QO-100 LO. Carlos Cabezas EB4FBZ has been kind enough to lend me a Vectron MD-011 GPSDO, which is much better than my DF9NP GPSDO and should allow me to measure the QO-100 LO.

Before starting the measurements with QO-100, I have taken the time to use the Vectron GPSDO to measure the Allan deviation of my DF9NP GPSDO over several days. This post is an account of the methods and results.

Second alpha for gr-satellites 3

Following the first alpha, I have released today v3-alpha1, the second alpha for gr-satellites 3. As I introduced in September, gr-satellites 3 will be a large refactor of gr-satellites, bringing many UI and under-the-hood changes. I am releasing a series of alphas during the development to get feedback from users. Each of the alphas focuses on a different aspect.

The second alpha is focused on input and output formats. New functionality has been implemented to allow the user to choose the input and output in a flexible way. This post describes the main features added.

First alpha for gr-satellites 3

In my last post, I introduced my plans to do a large refactor of gr-satellites, which when ready will originate a version 3.0.0 running on GNU Radio 3.8. During the development of this refactor, I intend to release alpha versions showing important new concepts or functionalities. The main goal of this is both to test if my ideas work well in practice and that interested people can start testing the new software and give feedback.

I have now published the first alpha release, which is called v3-alpha0. In this post I describe the functionality implemented in this alpha and how to use the software.

gr-satellites roadmap

In my talk at GRCon19 last week I presented the roadmap I have planned for gr-satellites for the next months and some longer term developments. The relevant slide can be seen below.

Here I will describe the roadmap in more detail, including how certain things will be done (or how to find your way among the different releases and branches in the Github repository), in order to get feedback from the community.

Światowid image decoder

Yesterday I spoke about the Światowid image downlink protocol. Today, Piotr Kuligowski SQ4NOW has published an image that he has been able to decode from Światowid. The image was taken at around 3:29 UTC and downlinked at 6:38 UTC over Warsaw.

Looking at SatNOGS recordings of this event, I have noticed that the image data is sent with sequence numbers, contrary to what I stated in the description of the protocol in my previous post. This is something that SatRevolution must have added down the road, since it wasn’t present when I worked with them in June.

The protocol is as I described, but the first two bytes of each Reed-Solomon block are used as a little-endian block counter. The remaining 46 bytes are used to send the JPEG file data. The block counter is reset to zero at the start of a new file, and is increased for each Reed-Solomon block.

This block counter allows for automatic detection of lost blocks and start of new images, so I have added an image decoder to the Światowid decoder in gr-satellites. The decoder is based on the 1KUNS-PF image decoder. If there are missing blocks, gaps full of zeros are inserted in the JPEG file in their position. This allows easily merging files decoded from different groundstations just by ORing the files.

As an example showing the image decoder, I have processed this SatNOGS recording, which was made by the station of Cees Bassa in the Netherlands. To process a SatNOGS recording with the gr-satellites decoder, the OGG audio must be converted to WAV (using oggdec, for example), and the gain of the “Multiply Const” block in swiatowid.grc must be changed from 10 to 1, since SatNOGS recordings usually have too much gain.

The recording only contains the beginning of the transmission. The pass was west to east and the transmission was done when the satellite was in view of Warsaw, so by the middle of the transmission the satellite is already below the horizon in the Netherlands. Still, 1128 blocks could be decoded correctly. This amounts to 51888 bytes. The complete file is 204796 bytes long.

The partial image decoded from the SatNOGS recording is shown below.

Image transmitted by Światowid on 2019-08-31 06:38 (partial)

This image matches the one that Piotr has shown on Twitter. I find it interesting that the SatRevolution logo is already added on-board the satellite to the top left corner of the image.