Hi Dani,
Great questions. On my long list of 'TO DOs' for the VTGS is to get our github account up and running to push our satellite GNU Radio work back out to the Open Source community. Once we do I'll post the code along with the pyBOMBS recipes for installation. I don't have an ETA for that though (maybe this Fall semester.....?). There are a few other things in the Out of Tree Module that would be of use to Hams as well. For example we have scramblers and descramblers that are AX.25 compliant. We also have an AFSK TRANSMITTER as well as an AFSK receiver (I've seen a few AFSK/AX.25 GNU Radio projects, but they are all receivers and they don't separate the demodulator from the link layer protocol). Fair warning if I ever do get the code posted and you play with it, the output of the modem is the raw 256 byte packet (after FEC decode and CRC check, that I send to a PDU socket). There is no pretty dashboard in our code. The intent was to develop a separate dashboard for AO-73 that would connect to the GNU-Radio modem over the socket (we operate our ground station remotely from a mini Mission Control at Space@VT). That is also on the long list of to dos.
I've never compared our receiver to the funcube dashboard side-by-side in a real detailed way. That is definitely something I would be interested in seeing the results of. I do use a funcube dongle with the dashboard for student demos with an arrow antenna. I would say comparing my 'impressions' of both is that they both work very well and basically just after AO-73 pops over the horizon we get solid decodes on both (FEC is great!). My gut is that with all of the great folks at AMSAT-UK and all of the good engineering effort they put into that software, that theirs probably performs a bit better. We make up for our probably higher implementation loss by have a pair of 14 element crossed yagis (2 M2 antennas 2MCP14s combined in phase), so lots of gain. The AO-73 dashboard also does the Automatic Frequency Correction, which is something we don't quite have implemented in our GNU Radio flowgraphs yet (we tune either manually or via a Gpredict interface to GNU-Radio to get inside the capture bandwidth of our differential bpsk demod).
Something that would make a good comparison easier to implement, and that I would like to see, is a Linux version (and open source) of the FunCube Dashboard. I don't really want to mess around with Windows emulators on our Linux servers/workstations in the VTGS. That could be a fun student project to try to integrate a Linux version of the Dashboard with the Socket interface to GNU Radio (and would allow us to forward the tlm packets to the data warehouse easier). That's one of the things I really like about the AO-85 dashboard is the cross-platform support.
Good questions, thanks for the interest. I'll try to put more effort into elevating the github thing on the to do list this semester.
-Zach, KJ4QLP
Research Associate Ted & Karyn Hume Center for National Security & Technology Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University Work Phone: 540-231-4174 Cell Phone: 540-808-6305
On 8/12/2016 10:55 AM, Daniel Estévez wrote:
El 12/08/16 a las 16:48, Zach Leffke escribió:
For our GNU-Radio modem, we need about 7 dB SNR (including implementation loss there) for solid demodulation.
Hi Zach,
Is this GNU-radio AO-73 receiver available online? It would be interesting to take a look at. How does it compare (in terms of SNR performance) to the dashboard software?
73,
Dani EA4GPZ.
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