W2MMD Satellite Station Copies Early Fox1Cliff Telemetry

The Fox1Cliff satellite was launched last night (12/3) and is currently in "safe mode" for testing. Telemetry is critical for the AMSAT tech team during the early stages of a satellite's life, and we had a 66 degree elevation pass this morning so I logged into the clubhouse VPN, opened a VNC window to the Fox in a Box (FIAB) Pi and also an SDR Console window so I could view and hear the signal. (For info about FIAB see this article.) In Safe mode there are only short transmissions every few minutes, so it was hard to get a good telemetry reading. But the signal was very strong when it was being transmitted, so I was hopeful of getting a few telemetry frames from a short transmission. I opened a TCP connection to the clubhouse from my local copy of PST Rotator and set to aim the antennas at the next Fox1Cliff pass.

The pass started, but I heard nothing.  This was expected - there are only short transmissions spaced with silence. But quickly I saw this signal appear indicating that a transmission was starting, and I quickly heard the recorded voice of "Veronica" saying "Fox1Cliff Safe Mode".

Unfortunately the FIAB program didn't lock onto that short transmission so I didn't get any telemetry. For the next transmission I manually clicked on the Fox1Cliff frequency in the receiver passband at the bottom of the screen and was rewarded by a strong "eye" pattern that indicates a decodable signal. I did that thru the remaining transmissions on that pass. And it looks like I was successful - the decoder shows 3 telemetry payloads decoded. Not bad for a very short window of transmissions. 


Since we're set to upload the telemetry automatically, this data should now be in the AMSAT warehouse. Hopefully it will be useful in assessing satellite health, and it's pretty cool that the GCARC resources can be used to help amateur satellites in this way.

73 de Jon WB2MNF

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