FloripaSat-1 and CAS-6 Launch - 2019-12-20

Was alerted to this one in this reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/ea6zi8/floripasat1_cubesat_launch_next_week/

Looks like FloripaSat-1 is going up on a Long March on the 20th.

General information on the sat: https://floripasat.ufsc.br/
Telemetry & orbit information: https://floripasat.ufsc.br/communication-info/
IARU coordination info: http://www.amsatuk.me.uk/iaru/finished_detail.php?serialnum=646

I’ve asked for preliminary TLEs, but so far the following information may help:

Altitude: 628.6km;
Inclination: 97.9°;
Repetition of the cycle: 31days;
Orbital period: 5835s;
Local time of ascending node: 10:30a.m.

Not 100% sure of the exact launch time. The countdown timer on their website has a date of 2019/12/21 00:30, but I don’t know if this is local, UTC, or even accurate at all. Spaceflight Now has the launch occurring at 2019-12-20 03:21Z, but that information is dated from the 2nd of December so may be inaccurate too.

73
Mark VK5QI

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Hello everyone!

I see that this one hasn’t been added before, but the launch is expected to be this friday (20/12) and I wanted to help adding it on the DB.

I’m not affiliated with the team, but highly interested in helping (learning!) how to build the Kaitai struct and the dashboards.

Here’s their website, which has mostly everything already for decoding: https://floripasat.ufsc.br/communication-info/

They seemed to have made everything necessary in english already, but if there’s anything in portuguese that’s necessary I can help to translate it.

I believe I’m following the other launch rules here, if anything just tell me and I’ll fix it.

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Mods - can this be joined with this thread: FloripaSat-1 Launch - 2019-12-20

(which fell off the front page due to the PSAT spam…)

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Nice that they already prepared for it!

Weird that I can’t find your thread anywhere, I guess I should’ve used the search function before…
Anyways, I’ll answer this here: the launch date is supposed to be in BRT, and (for now), it’s still on schedule for 20/12 00:21 BRT, which would be at 03:21 UTC.

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Threads are now merged. Welcome @yurimdias!

I’m going to add this satellite tomorrow, we will need to add its transmitter(s) and some preliminary TLE or details about its launch that maybe help us to produce the initial TLE.

On the kaitai and dashboards, I let @DL4PD to guide you. Feel free to join in our matrix/irc chat, this will make communication and guidance easier. :slight_smile:

EDIT I’ve just seen that @vk5qi has already added some info for the launch. :slight_smile:

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Hey @yurimdias welcome ! :slight_smile:

I already checked the provided documentation for making a kaitai structure, but if you want to try, it’s all yours :wink:

For the telemetry data, the documentation provided by the website is missing some details to make the structure; But i found it into the code here i think you will need that :slight_smile:

And i found that also we need more details about the ngham protocol, because as i read, it’s not sure which format is used by the downlink.

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Welcome @yurimdias,

Nice to see another one interested in building kaitai decoders and dashboards!
Building dashboards is the most of the fun, but it depends on the existence of a decoder and data decoded from the specific satellite. As long as there are no datapoints in the influxDB you won’t be able to select the correct fields for displaying.

A good start would be to play around with satnogs-decoders where a lot of decoders are implemented. Find the related source files inside the ksy/ folder! For the AX.25 downlink there maybe some good examples on how to implement them - for the NGHam protocol there is nothing yet. The NGHam protocol is not available from gr-satnogs so I would suggest to focus first on the AX.25 implementation.

Feel free to contact me for any kind of questions!
As @fredy said: the matrix chat is always a good point to meet a lot of developers…

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FloripaSat-1 is now in DB with the temporary NORAD ID 99822.

Now we need some preliminary TLE for start tracking it. @cgbsat is it possible to generate TLE from the info at the first post?

Here you go:

1 85001U          19354.13958333  .00000000  00000-0  50000-4 0    03
2 85001  97.9000  65.0000 0001427   0.0000 125.0000 14.80230757    01
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Looks like CAS-6 is going up on this launch too: https://amsat-uk.org/2019/12/19/camsat-cas-6-satellite/

Still no prelim TLEs it seems…

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I’ve just added CAS-6 in DB with temporary NORAD ID 99823.

I’m not sure about the transponder I’ve added, the link on the post above says Linear Transponder at 145.925MHz with bandwidth 20KHz inverted. I thought that this is the center frequency, so I added a transponder from 145.915KHz to 145.935KHz. If this is wrong please let me know.

Also I added USB and LSB for modes on the transponder but I’m not 100% sure that these are the right ones. If there is any suggestion or fix let me know or add a suggestion in DB.

For both I used @cgbsat TLE and scheduled for the first hours of their deployment. I scheduled a couple of observation in VHF and UHF on FloripaSat-1 and a couple on the two different VHF Telemetry frequencies on CAS-6.

If any newer/updated TLE come out, let me know here in order to add them.

I’ve changed both satellites to follow OBJECT A 44879. From some first observations it seems we got FloripaSat-1 but in the end of the observations, 44879 OBJECT seems to follow our TLE so the change should bring better results.

We have several observations with FloripaSat-1 signals on both VHF and UHF, from PA0DLO tweet:

I have moved FloripaSat-1 to follow OBJECT G with NORAD ID 44885.

Unfortunately nothing received from CAS-6, for now it follows OBJECT F with NORAD ID 44884.

Frequency coordination issues strike again. On this pass I thought we had finally had sight of CAS-6: https://network.satnogs.org/observations/1405998/

Unfortunately, it’s actually CAS-4B, which uses exactly the same frequencies as CAS-6… Confirmed by decoding the morse from saved IQ data, and also with ikhnos: https://twitter.com/vk5qi/status/1208233559850246145

CAS-4B can be identified by the morse callsign BJ1SL, whereas CAS-6 should be using BJ1SO. The callsign is transmitting as the first thing in each of the CW blocks. The last letter in the callsign is easiest to pick: dit dah dit dit (L) vs dah dah dah (O). If you hear a letter ‘L’, then it’s not CAS-6!

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https://www.amsat.org/pipermail/amsat-bb/2020-June/078054.html

It looks like CAS-6 is object 44881. We need to verify it from observation. More on this issue.

I’ve changed the TLE we follow for this satellite to Object 44881 TLE.