October 2015 - AMSAT-BB - mailman.amsat.org

fox telem
by Jim White 08 Oct '15

08 Oct '15

Got it going. You must use the drop down box to the right of the "Start" button to select your input source, then click "Start". That box starts out empty rather than showing the first input device in the list and there is no text there to prompt the selection of the input. It now finds and listens fine to sound card audio input and the FCD. You DO NOT need to run the FDC control program, FoxTelem will set the freq, although there doesn't appear to be any feedback to show the FDC got the message. Jim

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QRG for Telemetry on Fox-1A ?
by Bob KD7YZ 08 Oct '15

08 Oct '15

I have the fox-1 telemetry program running; am tracking using the guesstimate Keps .. but what is the freq for telemetry? Currently I am on 145.980 FM -- 73, Bob KD7YZ www.qrz.com/db/kd7yz AmSat LM#901

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fox tlm
by Jim White 08 Oct '15

08 Oct '15

As I read through the docs on the fox tlm program two things are not clear: If I have a FunCube Dongle hooked to a USB port and antenna, do I need to run any other software besides foxtelem.exe? With the FCD on the USB port and the IQ box checked in foxtelem.exe what should I see on the screen with no signal present? Noise, nothing? How do I know, before the signal is there, if this is working and the FCD is talking to foxtelem? When I run the FCD software it can talk to the FCD dongle, set the freq, etc. When I run foltelem there is no indication anything is talking to anything else. Jim

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Help Needed: GNU Radio + FoxTelem
by Zach Leffke 08 Oct '15

08 Oct '15

Hello Everyone, I am frantically rushing to get GNU Radio to 'play nice' with foxtelem. I'm running all linux here. I'm hoping someone can maybe throw me a few pointers on getting the fox telem software to work with external SDR applications. I'm attempting to pipe signals from GNU Radio in three ways, all met with failure: First is by running an FM receiver flowgraph and then trying to pipe the audio out via a Linux FIFO using the 'Wav File Sink' block in GR. I point the SDR flowgraph to my pipe, and then I point the FoxTelem software to the same pipe and fire the programs up. I've successfully used this method in the past to feed a sound streaming application that "thinks" is reading from a standard wav file, but is actually the GR flowgraph audio output. GNU Radio seems to run for a second or two (probably the amount of time it takes to fill the buffer) then the Fox Telem Software crashes with exceptions: 'javax.sound.sampled.UnsupportedAudioFileException: could not get the audio input stream from input file.' In gnu radio I'm using the wav file sink with a single port and sample rate of 48k and 16bits. This "appears" to match what FoxTelem is expecting, but I'm getting the crashes. An alternative method I'm attempting is to use a standard audio sink in gnuradio (I can hear the audio on my laptop speakers) and then try to pipe that into the fox sw with a virtual audio cable. I'm attempting to use JACK and qjackctl, but I have little experience with this and so far have failed to get it to do anything other than listen to the soundcard mic and line in ports. If someone knows of a simple to use Virtual Audio Cable for Linux so that I can pipe the audio via the sound card that would be great and I can give that a go. The third method I'm trying to get working is by placing the fox sw in IQ mode and again attempting to use a 'wave file source' in foxtelem pointed at a FIFO to pipe the IQ data from GNU radio into foxtelem. again I get the exception mentioned above. This would be the preferred method in my case over the audio piping. If someone has any experience with this that would be great. For those familiar with GNU Radio I'm taking the complex stream (250ksps), reesampling to 192ksps, converting to float, then taking the real and complex streams and feeding them into a 'Wav file sink' with TWO ports pointed at the fifo, again with 16 bit depth and set to 192ksps. Foxtelem is looking for a wav file at 192ksps. I'm hoping the two port file sink allows I data on the right channel (in0) and Q data on the left channel (in1). Any and all pointers would be welcome. Thanks, Zach, KJ4QLP

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FOX-1A decoded in Brazil
by Roland Zurmely 08 Oct '15

08 Oct '15

Please see here: <http://www.qsl.net/py4zbz/fox.htm#b> 73 de Roland PY4ZBZ

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FOX1-A
by PY5LF 08 Oct '15

08 Oct '15

Hi Very nice signal from FOX1-A over here , 20:16 UTC; https://youtu.be/ix9rZ5Mp4Io Congratulations to Amsat-NA. 73 PY5LF Luciano Fabricio Curitiba-PR-BR GG54jm http://www.qrz.com/db/PY5LF

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(no subject)
by Joe Fitzgerald 08 Oct '15

08 Oct '15

Patrick STODDARD (WD9EWK/VA7EWK) >Joe, >Does this mean it's official - Fox-1A is now AO-85? Will >the status page be changed to show AO-85, if this is the >case? It is not "official" until we get the formal announcement from W3XO, but he pre-allocated this number for us a few weeks ago so we can have URL's etc in place immediately post launch. -Joe

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FoxTelem - Delete your test data
by Chris Thompson 08 Oct '15

08 Oct '15

To FoxTelem users who loaded in a test wav file. You should DELETE the data before receiving live data. The test data has a later reset/uptime, so it will be displayed instead of the live data. You can do this from the File menu->Delete Payload Files. If you have already received some live data, and you are displaying something with a reset later than 0, then you are seeing your test data and not the live data. Rather than delete your files and lose the locally captured data, I suggest you edit the saved files and remove the test lines. Only the files Fox1rttelemetry.log, Fox1maxtelemetry.log and Fox1mintelemetry.log will contain the test data. Each line starts with the UTC date and then the FoxId, reset, uptime. Remove any rows with reset 44 (or a reset greater than zero at this stage). Sorry for the incomvience 73 Chris -- Chris E. Thompson chrisethompson(a)gmail.com g0kla(a)arrl.net

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Re: [amsat-bb] Help Needed: GNU Radio + FoxTelem
by Zach Leffke 08 Oct '15

08 Oct '15

Hi Chris thanks for the feedback. 1) real machine. I'm aware of the temp fix, and have a cable at home for the 'HW' loopback method (though thats cheating when your trying to build an SDR ground station :-)) 2) Working through using JACK and ALSA virtual devices, but like I said I'm new to it. 3) I'm using a .wav file sink in gnuradio. But instead of actually recording the audio and generate a true wav file (that could be imported by foxtelem later) the 'file' it is writing to is a FIFO buffer (aka pipe, created using the 'mkfifo' command). FoxTelem is then reading a wave file which is that same buffer. The goal being as bits get written into the FIFO from gnuradio, they get read out of the buffer by FoxTelem. What it looks like is exactly what you said. GNU radio is writing to the 'file' or FIFO at a fixed 48k sample rate. FoxTelem is probably trying to 'load the entire file' and is not throttling the rate those bits come in to match the 48k rate from gnuradio, thus resulting in 'EOF-type' errors and ultimately crashing. I think the quickest path to gettng up and running is the virtual audio cable piping method (for a pure SW solution). Downside of this is the loss of the ability to deliver the SNR and doppler metrics to the AMSAT network. So at some point I'll try to revisit the IQ pipe ideas (though plan A of faking it with an 'IQ wav file' will result in similar crashes). I'm not sure how FoxTelem handles interfacing with the funcube dongle or 'other SDRs.' I think it would auto-populate the option to select the funcube source if I actually had one plugged into my laptop and make use of the drivers for accessing the IQ stream, rather than 'reading a whole file'. What would be cool is if FoxTelem had some kind of 'generic IQ client mode' that could be selected. The idea would be when you select that option you enter in an IP and port #. Then foxtelem could be interfaced with things like the 'rtl_tcp' application for RTL-SDRs running on RPis or beaglebones or to the TCP sinks in GNU Radio. easy for me though to offer up ideas like that when I'm not the one that has to code it up though :-). Thanks again for the feedback. -Zach, KJ4QLP On 10/08/2015 03:01 PM, Chris Thompson wrote: > Zach, > > Are you running Linux on a virtual machine or a real machine? If its > a real machine with a sound card, you can probably use a physical > cable temporarily while we work out how to pipe the audio. Most > modern sound cards allow you to feed the audio out of the speaker and > back into the mic. > > I think Jack Audio will be the best approach, but the virtual audio > products can be complex. I am not familiar with Jack but we have used > Virtual Audio Cable and other software on Windows. > > If you are creating a "virtual wav file", I presume that file gets > written to disk and then you are opening it in FoxTelem? Is that > right? The issue with this is that FoxTelem will read it faster than > it gets filled. It won't wait for more audio - like it does with a > soundcard - and will think it has reached the end of the file, or > crashes as you indicated. > > Chris > > On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 1:20 PM, Zach Leffke <zleffke(a)vt.edu > <mailto:zleffke@vt.edu>> wrote: > > Hello Everyone, > I am frantically rushing to get GNU Radio to 'play nice' with > foxtelem. I'm running all linux here. I'm hoping someone can > maybe throw me a few pointers on getting the fox telem software to > work with external SDR applications. I'm attempting to pipe > signals from GNU Radio in three ways, all met with failure: > > First is by running an FM receiver flowgraph and then trying to > pipe the audio out via a Linux FIFO using the 'Wav File Sink' > block in GR. I point the SDR flowgraph to my pipe, and then I > point the FoxTelem software to the same pipe and fire the programs > up. I've successfully used this method in the past to feed a > sound streaming application that "thinks" is reading from a > standard wav file, but is actually the GR flowgraph audio output. > GNU Radio seems to run for a second or two (probably the amount of > time it takes to fill the buffer) then the Fox Telem Software > crashes with exceptions: > > 'javax.sound.sampled.UnsupportedAudioFileException: could not get > the audio input stream from input file.' > > In gnu radio I'm using the wav file sink with a single port and > sample rate of 48k and 16bits. This "appears" to match what > FoxTelem is expecting, but I'm getting the crashes. > > An alternative method I'm attempting is to use a standard audio > sink in gnuradio (I can hear the audio on my laptop speakers) and > then try to pipe that into the fox sw with a virtual audio cable. > I'm attempting to use JACK and qjackctl, but I have little > experience with this and so far have failed to get it to do > anything other than listen to the soundcard mic and line in > ports. If someone knows of a simple to use Virtual Audio Cable > for Linux so that I can pipe the audio via the sound card that > would be great and I can give that a go. > > The third method I'm trying to get working is by placing the fox > sw in IQ mode and again attempting to use a 'wave file source' in > foxtelem pointed at a FIFO to pipe the IQ data from GNU radio into > foxtelem. again I get the exception mentioned above. This would > be the preferred method in my case over the audio piping. If > someone has any experience with this that would be great. For > those familiar with GNU Radio I'm taking the complex stream > (250ksps), reesampling to 192ksps, converting to float, then > taking the real and complex streams and feeding them into a 'Wav > file sink' with TWO ports pointed at the fifo, again with 16 bit > depth and set to 192ksps. Foxtelem is looking for a wav file at > 192ksps. I'm hoping the two port file sink allows I data on the > right channel (in0) and Q data on the left channel (in1). > > > Any and all pointers would be welcome. > > Thanks, > Zach, KJ4QLP > _______________________________________________ > Sent via AMSAT-BB(a)amsat.org <mailto:AMSAT-BB@amsat.org>. AMSAT-NA > makes this open forum available > to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. > Opinions expressed > are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the official > views of AMSAT-NA. > Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite > program! > Subscription settings: http://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb > > > > > -- > Chris E. Thompson > chrisethompson(a)gmail.com <mailto:chrisethompson@gmail.com> > g0kla(a)arrl.net <mailto:g0kla@arrl.net>

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Fox-1 in Wales-UK
by GW1FKY＠aol.com 08 Oct '15

08 Oct '15

Hi, I am hearing Fox-1 here in Wales -UK on the pass 2029 hrs Zulu - Frequency 145.980 Mhz (FM). The announcement " Fox One Speech Mode " is very loud and clear. Congratulations to all involved in the success of the launch activation and support for the project. Regards and pleasure to report on the success. Ken Eaton GW1FKY Amsat-UK Amsat NA

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