This article is more than 1 year old
Catching Cubesat chatter? There's an app for that!
Open source software is here to help sat-watching hams
Radio ham with an interest in free software and satellite signals? Pop over to the GitHub repo run by Daniel Estévez, and take a look at his GNU radio decoders.
Estévez's gr-satellites project provides a collection of applications to decode satellite telemetry.
The focus here is on micro-satellites and cubesats. Currently, the Auusat-4, 3CAT-2 and GOMX-3 satellites are supported, but the repo shows he's also working on support for AISat, Beesat (1, 2 and 4), ATHENOXAT-1, LilacSat-2, and Tianwang 1A (TW-1A).
Estévez writes that this is an interest-and-evangelical project: “to try to make more people interested in receiving digital telemetry from satellites and collaborating in online telemetry submission.”
The decoders are also designed to help users receiving satellite signals upload them to the PeoSAT telemetry server.
“The long-term goal of this project is to provide an alternative software chain to the UZ7HO soundmodem, AGW packet engine and DK3WN telemetry forwarder. The use of GNUradio makes these decoders more configurable and flexible and eases programming decoders for non-AX.25 satellites, which usually employ strong forward error correction,” he writes. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
