Sep 5 – 9, 2023
ASU Memorial Union (2nd Floor)
US/Arizona timezone
GRCon23 will be running from Tuesday Sept 5 to Saturday Sept 9 this year.

Demodulation demonstration using the LightCube CubeSat

Sep 8, 2023, 11:00 AM
15m
Arizona (MU 221) (ASU Memorial Union 2nd Floor)

Arizona (MU 221)

ASU Memorial Union 2nd Floor

Paper (with talk) GNU Radio in Education Main Track

Speakers

Lindsay Berkhout (ASU) Lindsay Berkhout (Arizona State University)

Description

LightCube is a 1U Educational Cubesat which had the goal of connecting the public with space by producing a flash visible to the naked eye on command by a public user. The spacecraft could be triggered via HAM radio communications by those with an amateur license. LightCube is commanded with a DTMF sequence, and reports telemetry using RTTY, an AFSK modulation scheme. Telemetry is decoded with a custom GNURadio companion flowgraph. Several radio applications were written, including a from-scratch decoder written for educational purposes and one optimized to be compatible with the SatNOGS environment. Lightcube deployed from the international space station on April 24th 2023 and operated for 24 hours before suffering a battery failure. During this time it was tracked by many amateurs around the world with observations reported to the SatNOGs database. Audio observations of the beacons were subsequently decoded by the student team and by amateurs. Having received many observations from around the world, the team has been able to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to loss of communications.

Talk Length 15 Minutes
Link to Open Source Code https://github.com/ASU-cubesat/lightcube_telemetry

Primary author

Lindsay Berkhout (Arizona State University)

Co-authors

Christopher McCormick (Arizona State University) Prof. Daniel Jacobs (Arizona State University) Jaime Sanchez De La Vega (Arizona State University)

Presentation materials