UWE-3 is celebrating his 6th birthday

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UWE-3 News: Today UWE-3 is celebrating his 6th birthday

On a drizzly day in November 2013 for the first time UWE-3 saw the lights of the stars. Since this 21st of November in 2013 six years passed by in which UWE-3 and the team had a lot of work and fun together.

Day by day many radio amateurs from around the world send us UWE-3 beacons to supply us with the health state of UWE-3, which is still excellent. For example the batteries are still in a good shape:

Since the very first day we received great support from the radio amateur community. Our database counts already 291.104 external beacons sent to us from you.

Thank you!

Hopefully, UWE-3 will keep its good shape and the great support from you!

Kind regards,

The team of UWE‑3

Posted in UWE

GRCon19: gr-satellites

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gr-satellites: a collection of decoders for Amateur satellites by Daniel Estévez

It is an OOT module encompassing a collection of telemetry decoders that supports nearly 40 different Amateur satellites. This open-source project started in 2015 with the goal of providing telemetry decoders for all the satellites that transmit on the Amateur radio bands. It supports most popular protocols, such as AX.25, the GOMspace NanoCom U482C and AX100 modems, an important part of the CCSDS stack, the AO-40 protocol used in the FUNcube satellites, and several ad-hoc protocols used in other satellites.

This OOT module can be very useful as a supply of building blocks for people interested in developing their own communications systems for satellites and other applications, as a material for the study of how different satellite modems are implemented, or as a readily available ground-station solution for many existing satellites.

SDR# UDP Audio Stream plugin

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SDR# UDP Audio Stream PluginThis was something I was looking for, for a long time. The plugin makes it possible to stream the demodulated SDR# audio via UDP to another program that is listening on that specific TCP/IP address and UDP port. The same function was already available within GQRX. This for example makes it possible to receive and demodulate satellite telemetry and send it to GNURadio where the final telemetry decoding will be done.

The plugin consists of two files and the magic line for the SDR# plugin.xml file.

NAudio.dll and SDRSharp.UDPAudio.dll

Magic line: <add key=”UDPAudioPlugin” value=”SDRSharp.UDPAudio.UDPAudioPlugin,SDRSharp.UDPAudio” />

Source: UDP Audio Stream plugin

SigintOS

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SigintOS

Also for HAM Radio enthusiasts SigintOS can be a way to get acquainted with the Linux operating systems and SDR radios.

SigintOS; as the name suggests, SIGINT is an improved Linux distribution for Signal Intelligence. This distribution is based on Ubuntu Linux. It has its own software called SigintOS. With this software, many SIGINT operations can be performed via a single graphical interface.

Hardware and software installation problems faced by many people interested in signal processing are completely eliminated with SigintOS. HackRF, BladeRF, USRP, RTL-SDR are already installed, and the most used Gnuradio, Gsm and Gps applications are also included in the distribution.

SigintOS works live from a DVD or USB memory stick. Users can also perform the installation process on the hard disk. For installation, simply download sigintos.iso from this download link and write it to a USB flash drive or DVD. It can also run smoothly on virtualization applications such as VMware or VirtualBox.

Source: SigintOS

Posted in SDR

UWE-4 News

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Last week our Team returned from the Vostochny Launch Site (Russia) where we performed the last check out tests of UWE-4 before launch. The satellite will be launched through the German integrator ECM Space on a Soyuz-2 mission using a Fregat upper stage on 27th December 2018 at 02:07:18 UTC. UWE-4 transportation to Far East of Russia was very smooth, so only a last software update and recharging of the batteries needed to be performed. By now, UWE-4 has been successfully integrated into the launch deployer followed by the integration with the upper stage, the fairing encapsulation will occur today.

In the meantime we updated our website to provide more detailed information about the orbit and the communication parameter including the beacon decoding information. You can find all these and some more details here: http://www7.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/forschung/space-exploration/projects/uwe-4/ As soon as we can provide the TLE, you will find them also on our website.

Kind regards, The UWE‑4 Team

Posted in UWE

Amateur Deep Space Tracking

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This is a copy of a message send by PA0DLO to the Amsat-BB mailing list with information on how to track Satellites carrying amateur radio payloads that will go into deep space.

All,

Many radio amateurs are familiar with tracking amateur satellites that orbit the Earth in low orbits or high elliptical orbits. Several tracking programs and all required orbital parameters are available for tracking these satellites.

But soon spacecraft carrying an amateur radio payload will be launched towards the Moon and beyond. If amateurs want to track these spacecraft they will need suitable tracking software and orbital elements to be able to calculate the positions of these spacecraft.

Calculations

Unfortunately none of the currently available tracking programs, used for satellite tracking by amateurs, is suitable for deep space tracking. But fortunately two free, open source software packages for Windows, Linux and Mac are available, that will enable deep space tracking:

General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT)
http://gmatcentral.org/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gmat/files/GMAT/GMAT-R2017a/

SciLab, including CelestLab, CelestLabX and Aerospace Blockset
http://www.scilab.org/
http://atoms.scilab.org/toolboxes/celestlab
https://atoms.scilab.org/toolboxes/aerospace_blockset

Probably most amateurs will prefer GMAT, because it is most user friendly, has a lot of documentation and help files, and contains many sample scripts. Scripts that are created by other amateurs can be used without having much knowledge or experience with GMAT.

Measurements

It is not certain that orbital elements for all deep space spacecraft carrying amateur radio payloads will be made available to radio amateurs. Therefore amateurs may need to measure these orbital elements themselves through doppler and ranging measurements. So amateurs will need to set up their own Amateur Deep Space Network, similar to NASA’s DSN, ESA’s Estrack, etc. This will require some stations with large enough antennas and with equipment to carry out doppler and ranging measurements to determine direction and distance to the spacecraft. This new development is an interesting challenge for radio amateurs.

For further details see my Amateur Deep Space Tracking page:
https://hamsat1.home.xs4all.nl/index.html

You can find further information on space flight on this very informative set of pages:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/basics/
Deep space navigation is covered in chapter 13:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/basics/chapter13-1/

Source: Nico PA0DLO

Some extra information by Daniel Estevez (EA4GPZ)
http://destevez.net/2018/05/dslwp-bs-journey-to-the-moon-part-i/