Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

BEESAT-1 not correctly decoded #670

Open
PistonMiner opened this issue Sep 25, 2024 · 1 comment
Open

BEESAT-1 not correctly decoded #670

PistonMiner opened this issue Sep 25, 2024 · 1 comment

Comments

@PistonMiner
Copy link

PistonMiner commented Sep 25, 2024

We've recently managed to recover BEESAT-1. As it turns out, gr-satellites apparently is not compatible with it currently unfortunately. It appears to be configured to use Mobitex-NX, however BEESAT-1 actually predates that and uses a slightly different form more alike the standard Mobitex protocol.

A Mobitex-NX frame looks like this:
bit sync: repeated aa
frame sync: 0ef0
control bytes: e.g. e.g. 3f00
control byte FEC: e.g. c0
callsign: e.g. 44503042454d
callsign checksum: e.g. 4df7
followed by a variable number of Mobitex blocks.

A BEESAT-1 frame looks like this:
callsign: 445030424545
reserved: 5252
bit sync: cccc
frame sync: 0ef0
control bytes: e.g. 1405
control byte FEC: e.g. ec
followed by 32 Mobitex blocks.

AFAIK gr-satellites does the deframing of Mobitex-NX via gr-tnc_nx, which actually has a separate flowgraph for BEESAT-1 as well which uses the tnc_b1 block instead of the nx_decoder block combined with the tnc_nx block. gr-satellites just uses the nx_decoder block always as far as I can tell, so this difference in framing related to the position of the callsign messes things up.

For reference, the header of a frame looks like this for BEESAT-1 (courtesy of this awesome SatNOGS observation from the Dwingeloo radiotelescope):
b1_preamble

@daniestevez
Copy link
Owner

@PistonMiner thanks for the information. It doesn't look like the tnc_b1 block can be a drop-in replacement for the tnc_nx block used in mobitex_deframer.py. It seems to have additional ports.

Moreover, support for the BEESATs is not available in the main branch of gr-satellites, because of #238. Has anyone ported gr-tnc_nx to GNU Radio 3.10 yet?

If anyone wants to work on this I will happy to advise and get the pull request merged, but in principle I have no plans of bringing support to BEESAT-1 on my own, especially because without gr-tnc_nx in GNU Radio 3.10, the usefulness of this would be quite limited.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

2 participants