rust – Daniel Estévez

Maia SDR

I’m happy to announce the release of Maia SDR, an open-source FPGA-based SDR project focusing on the ADALM Pluto. The first release provides a firmware image for the Pluto with the following functionality:

Web-based interface that can be accessed from a smartphone, PC or other device.
Real-time waterfall display supporting up to 61.44 Msps (limit given by the AD936x RFIC of the Pluto).
IQ recording in SigMF format, at up to 61.44 Msps and with a 400 MiB maximum data size (limit given by the Pluto RAM size). Recordings can be downloaded to a smartphone or other device.

A Rust implementation of Galileo OSNMA

Galileo OSNMA (Open Service Navigation Message Authentication) is a protocol that will allow Galileo GNSS receivers to authenticate cryptographically the navigation data that is broadcast by Galileo satellites. The system is currently in a public test phase and according to the roadmap it will begin the initial service in 2023.

This month I have spent some time working in a new Rust library that implements the receiver-side processing of OSNMA. The library is called galileo-osnma. Although there are still some features that are not implemented, and some other future ideas that I have for this library, it has already reached a point where I feel it can be released and used by others. In its present state it is already able to perform all the steps that are needed to check all the OSNMA authentication data that is currently being transmitted by the satellites during the test phase. The library is licensed under a permissive open source license (Apache + MIT, which is common in the Rust ecosystem).

LDPC code design for my QO-100 narrowband modem

A couple months ago I presented my work-in-progress design for a data modem intended to be used through the QO-100 NB transponder. The main design goal for this modem is to give the maximum data rate possible in a 2.7 kHz channel at 50 dB·Hz CN0. For the physical layer I settled on an RRC-filtered single-carrier modulation with 32APSK data symbols and an interleaved BPSK pilot sequence for synchronization. Simulation and over-the-air tests of this modulation showed good performance. The next step was designing an appropriate FEC.

Owing to the properties of the synchronization sequence, a natural size for the FEC codewords of this modem is 7595 bits (transmitted in 1519 data symbols). The modem uses a baudrate of 2570 baud, so at 50 dB·Hz CN0 the Es/N0 is 15.90 dB. In my previous post I considered using an LDPC code with a rate of 8/9 or 9/10 for FEC, taking as a reference the target Es/N0 performance of the DVB-S2 MODCODs. After some performing some simulations, it turns out that 9/10 is a bit too high with 7595 bit codewords (the DVB-S2 normal FECFRAMEs are 64800 bits long, giving a lower LDPC decoding threshold). Therefore, I’ve settled on trying to design a good rate 8/9 FEC. At this rate, the Eb/N0 is 9.42 dB.