The FM / Codec2 voice repeater on Taurus-1 went "live" today (17-Sept-2019) with 2 passes available to stations on the U.S. East Coast.

W2RTV posted a video of the entire pass as seen from his station at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge9mSscTZYg

The spacecraft is clearly spinning at a high rate; my receive audio wasn't nearly as good as Rocco's, but he's got a vastly superior antenna setup, so that never hurts.

The repeater's uplink is normal FM on 145.820 MHz w/ a 67 Hz CTCSS tone. High power is definitely not needed but adjusting for uplink doppler can help extend your range.

The downlink is a Codec2 digital stream at 9600 BPSK which you receive as USB on 435.840 MHz. That gets you in the ballpark, anyway. Once downlink packets are observed, center your 15k-wide USB window on the packets and doppler track from there.

The digital voice stream (as well as telemetry) decodes with a flowgraph in GNU Radio. The original telemetry decoder for Taurus-1 was produced by EA4GPZ and is located at https://github.com/daniestevez/gr-satellites

Several of us have added to Dani's flowgraph to provide audio output now that the repeater is active. That hybrid flowgraph can be found at: https://www.qsl.net/k/k4kdr//grc/taurus1-k4kdr-telem+audio-v1.grc

Note that both the original decoder from Dani as well as the hybrid voice/telemetry flowgraph expect UDP audio input such as from GQRX.

Here is a Tweet I posted after my first contact on the repeater today with a screen shot which pretty clearly shows how the spacecraft is spinning: https://twitter.com/scott23192/status/1174001658419994624

This repeater seems to work extremely well and should be way better if the spin rate reduces over time. Hope to hear more people on!

-Scott, K4KDR