On 17 October 2024, I presented my poster "Software Defined Radio Data Processing on board OPS-SAT Space Laboratory" at the 75th International Astronautical Congress (IAC 2024) in Milan. It was in the Interactive Presentations of the IAF Space Operations Symposium (paper IAC-24,B6,IPB,15,x82617). The photo at the top shows me with people from the SimLE Science Club in front of the IAC 2024 sign.
The poster is about Experiment 266 (EXP266), the subject of my master's thesis. OPS-SAT was a 3-unit CubeSat of ESA and a flying laboratory for new software and operations. After four years in orbit, the satellite was degraded: the eMMC memory had corrupted parts, and the processor could not handle radio data in real time. EXP266 works around this. It records the radio samples directly to a stable part of the eMMC, makes a small waterfall plot for the ground, and extracts only the signals of interest from the recording.
The poster also shows the result of our live test at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress on 29 December 2023. At 19:03:38 UTC, OPS-SAT started to record, and we transmitted a voice message with greetings and our callsigns. We downloaded the recording over three S-band passes. The voice was faint, but we could hear the message :)
In Milan, there was already a stand that promoted IAC 2027 in Poznań. The next congress in Poland, I'm looking forward to it :D
The poster, the thesis and the code are open:
- Poster (PDF, CC BY 4.0): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24230137
- Paper page in the IAF Digital Library: IAC-24,B6,IPB,15,x82617
- Master's thesis: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24229605
- Source code: github.com/yasiupl/OPS-SAT-SDR
Ad Astra!