Tagged: space

SDR Talks from the SDRMakerspace Online Presentation

Thank you to Robert for letting us know about these videos from the "ESA ARTES SDR MakerSpace Presentations" from September 6-8, 2021 which are now available on YouTube. 

Libre Space Foundation ( Greece) and the Institute of Reconfigurable & Embedded Digital Systems(REDS) of the Haute Ecole d’Ingénierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud – HEIG-VD (Switzerland) have been implementing a number of smaller projects as part of an Software Defined Radio MakerSpace of the European Space Agency.

This activity is part of the ARTES programme of ESA that supports innovation in satellite communications.

The findings were presented in three 2-hour slots in the afternoon at 15:00 CEST (for which you are requested to register separately) on Mon 6, Tue 7 and Wed 8 September 2021.

  • Monday 6 Sep was focused on the evaluation of various SDR boards and FPGA tools chains. High-rate direct sampling by SDR’s and SDR on Android will also be presented.
  • Tuesday 7 Sep was dedicated to building blocks that have been implemented as open source developments for Gnuradio, such as gr-leo, gr-ccsds, gr-soapy etc.
  • Wednesday 8 Sep was mainly about the combination of SDR and AI/ML to do signal detection and classification. In addition, an SDR testbed and spectrum monitoring will be presented.

The talks cover various SDR topics related to satellite observing. Some talks we were interested in are highlighted below, but the full list can be found on the SDRMakerspace website, or the SDRMakerspace playlist on the Libre Space Foundation YouTube channel.

SDRMakerspace - SDR on mobile

Receiving the Chinese Yutu Moon Rover with the RTL-SDR

Amateur radio hobbyist EB3FRN was able to use his RTL-SDR to receive the telemetry signal from the recently landed Chinese Yutu moon rover. The Yutu rover transmits at 8462.08000 MHz, which is outside of any RTL-SDRs frequency range, so he used a downconverter with a local oscillator at 8 GHz to convert the signal to 462 MHz.

For the software he used Baudline and rtl_fm as the receiver. He has posted a short audio clip of the received signal on his blog as well.

Chinese Yutu Moon Rover Received with RTL-SDR and Baudline
Chinese Yutu Moon Rover Received with RTL-SDR and Baudline