Over the last two weeks the QB50 experiment was launched from the International Space Station (ISS). The experiment consists of 36 cubesats built by various universities around the world, with the main science goal being to make measurements of the thermosphere (an upper atmospheric layer that the ISS orbits in). All the cubesats broadcast their telemetry in the 70cm (420 – 450 MHz) amateur band and they are expected to stay in orbit for about 3 months before falling back to earth. In a previous post we made a point to mention Lilacsat-1, which is one of the most interesting QB50 satellites due to its implementation of a FM to digital voice repeater on board.

Over on his blog destevez has been following these satellites, and has uploaded a post that shows him receiving and decoding several of the satellite telemetry packets. His gr-satellites GNU Radio package provides a means to decode many of the satellites in the experiment.