In my last post I spoke about the James Webb Space Telescope telemetry, and I decoded a recording I made with the Allen Telescope Array. I used an IQ sample rate of 3.84 Msps when doing this recording because I wanted to see if there were any ranging signals. Usually, ranging signals have a bandwidth of 1.5 MHz or less in baseband, so after phase modulation, approximately 3 MHz are used. Thus, 3.84 Msps gives enough bandwidth to record the typical ranging signals.
After looking at the waterfall of the recording carefully, I saw that there are sequential ranging signals present almost all the time. This is expected. Since the recording was done 7 hours after the first correction manoeuvre, the DSN would be doing ranging to compute accurate ephemerides. Often, ranging signals are not used every time that a spacecraft is tracked, but only when the ephemerides need to be refined, such as when planning a manoeuvre or shortly after executing one.
In this post I analyse these sequential ranging signals. I still haven’t had time to publish the recordings in Zenodo. After seeing that the wideband recording is of interest, due to the presence of these signals, I’m planning to publish a shorter segment of the wideband recording (the full recording is 241 GB per polarization) and publish a decimated version of the full recording where only around 100 kHz of spectrum are present (which is enough for the telemetry signal).