Welcome to SiqNAL’s documentation!¶
This project aims to provide a reliable open-sourced cubesats tracking following different mechanisms and protocols for transmitting signals that too using very low end receiver i.e Software Defined Radio (SDR) and under limited computation power. As an input it takes output file of sdr (both .dat or .wav) plots waterfall displaying of the signal file showing signal present in different bands of frequency. Further, it applies bandpass filtering to remove undesired frequency and based upon the transmission mechanism used by the transponder on the satellite it follows appropriate tracking pipeline. Right now transponders following Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS), Beacons or Automatic Picture Transmission (APT) is supported.
Our future goal is to make this project more universal by tracking signals using correlation of signal received from different ground stations but, it will require us to know the preamble part of signal in advance as well as synchronized signals from multiple sources since simple signal correlation gives ambiguous results due to colored gaussian noise.
This project is part of Google Summer of Code 2017 under Aerospaceresearch written by Jay Krishna with Andreas Hornig as mentor.
The project repository can be accessed on GitHub , blog post at Wordpress and detailed explanation on Google Document.