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BEESAT-1 not correctly decoded

Open PistonMiner opened this issue 4 months ago • 1 comments

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

PistonMiner avatar Sep 25 '24 03:09 PistonMiner