I'm interested in people's comments on the reliability of the BPSK-1000 digital link in the presence of the deep periodic fading that everyone is reporting. This fading is probably because the spacecraft hasn't settled down into a stable spin around its preferred spin axis (which includes the antennas). But I designed the BPSK-1000 format to be specifically resistant to fading, so I'm really curious to see how well it's working in practice.
Although the decoders don't explicitly distinguish between lost frames and idle link time (hard to do given the signal design) you can gauge the effectiveness of the decoding from the amount of data you do successfully decode per unit time. If people could estimate how many bytes per minute of decoded data they're getting, and assuming the computer doesn't let the link idle very much, that would be a good indication of how well the system is performing overall.
The channel symbol rate is 1000 Hz. After rate 1/2 Viterbi FEC the actual link data rate is 500 bps. From this you have to subtract idle inter-frame time and HDLC frame overhead (flags, 4-byte CRCs, etc) that varies with the length of the frame, leaving the data. So in 1 minute you could receive up to 3750 bytes of binary user data. How close are people coming to this figure?
Phil