Decoding OPS-SAT’s beacon
ESA is challenging anyone with amateur radio equipment to catch the first signals from OPS-SAT, ESA’s brand new space software laboratory.
On December 17, the 3U CubeSat OPS-SAT will be launched into low-Earth orbit on a Soyuz rocket from Kourou in South America, together with ESA’s Cheops exoplanet-tracker.
Lift-off is scheduled for 08:54:20 GMT on Tuesday, December 17. Deployment will begin 15044.6 seconds later (T+15044.6 seconds), expected to be at 13:05:04 GMT.
15 minutes after satellite deployment, when the UHF antenna and solar array deployment have been confirmed, OPS-SAT will begin transmitting 9600 bps GMSK on 437.200 MHz. The first two passes over Europe are expected on the same evening.
The OPS-SAT flight control team has developed open source software which allows anyone to receive the 437.200 MHz beacon of OPS-SAT and decode it.
Full details in the ESA article at http://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/Calling_radio_amateurs_help_find_OPS-SAT
OPS-SAT UHF Specification https://github.com/esa/gr-opssat/blob/master/docs/os-uhf-specs.pdf
OPS-SAT GitHub https://github.com/esa/gr-opssat/