New satellite : IGOSAT

Satellites & Observations
1

Hello !
My name is Sébastien Durand and I am the new CubeSat project manager and System engineer for IGOSAT.

This satellite is a CubeSat Student funding for the JANUS project of CNES and through the LabEx UnivEarth. The project is mainly supported by the APC and IPGP laboratory.

http://igosat.in2p3.fr/fr/page-d-exemple/

This project has existed since 2013, for a launch scheduled for the end of 2021.

Currently more than 300 students have been involved via projects or internships (~ 80 internships of 2 to 6 months).

This project has 2 payloads:

  • A double Scintillator capable of detecting and analyzing Gamma radiation as well as electrons. This instrument is fully developed by students and the APC lab.
  • A dual-frequency GPS dedicated to the analysis of the Ionosphere thanks to the concealment.

These payloads are embedded in a 3U platform developed by the students.

For telecommunication on the ground, we use a telecom card and an antenna bought from ISIS Space.
We have summarized our allocation of frequencies for the satellite :
Satellite transmission frequency: 435.524MHz, GMSK, 9600Bauds
Satellite reception frequency: 145.925MHz, FSK, up to 9600Bauds

We have just finished manufacturing and validating the reception part of our ground station.

For the antenna part we have 2 crossed Yagi antennas as well as a Yaesu G-5500 rotor.

All this is currently controlled by an EA4TX ARS-USB interface linked via HAMLib to Gpredict.

We were able to perform receptions and decoding via an Airspy R2 connected to GQRX connected to GNURadio and GR-Satellite.

We intend to set up, in parallel, an autonomous Satnogs Omnidirectional station.

For the emission part, our choice turned to the new SDR solutions based on FPGA. We have at our disposal a LimeSDR, a PlutoSDR and soon a BladeRF 2.0 Micro.

We intend to base ourselves on the Python + GNURadio application developed by OPS-Sat for reception and developed a similar application for transmission.
Any help would be welcome because we do not have internal telecommunication skills to help us.

We would also like to create a Satnogs dashboard in order to share all the IGOSAT data.

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2

Hi @dragonlost

You can start from https://wiki.satnogs.org/Satellite_Mission_Guide that has recently started to be populated and it is still work in progress. If something is unclear, please let us know in order to improve the guide, which feel free also to edit if you think that something is missing.

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