Category: Digital Signals

GNU Radio Amateur Radio Meeting: A Look at Project 25 (P25) Digital Radio

Over on their YouTube channel GNU Radio have uploaded a recent talk by Aaron Rossetto titled "A Look at Project 25 (P25) Digital Radio". The talk explains the North American public safety P25 system in great depth, and is a good watch for anyone looking into details on how the system works in a deeply technical way. He later shows some examples of his P25 decoding and recording setup. Slides can be found here, and the video is posted below.

Agenda: In this presentation, I will introduce Project 25 digital radio, with a strong emphasis on its use in North American public safety trunked radio systems, and to describe experiments monitoring and decoding P25 traffic using GNU Radio code.

  • What is Project 25?
  • A brief introduction to trunked radio
  • Diving into the P25 protocol
    • Modulation
    • Packet framing and encapsulation
    • Packet types
  • GNU Radio and P25 decoding experiments
Amateur Radio Meetup: P25 Trunked Radio

Receiving SpaceX Falcon 9 Telemetry with a HackRF and 1.2m Satellite Dish

Over on the Reddit /r/SpaceXLounge discussion board user /u/Xerbot has made an interesting post showing how u/derekcz was able to receive the telemetry signals from the latest SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch using a HackRF and a 1.2m prime focus dish with homebuilt feed designed for the 2232.5 MHz downlink frequency. Then after demodulating the signal with GNU Radio, /u/Xerbot was able to convert that signal into binary data, and then into plain text strings. 

Another user /u/Origin_of_Mind then figured out that these strings are debug messages being sent by the software-defined GPS receiver, which amongst other data contains the GPS coordinates of the second stage. The GPS data indicates that the second stage was tracking over the north of Serbia at an altitude of 219 km and velocity of 7483m/s. /u/derekcz was able to then confirm that he was indeed recording the signal when the satellite would have been crossing Serbia, confirming the received telemetry was correct.

The entire thread is an interesting read, with multiple users dissecting the plaintext and finding out information about the launch. /u/Origin_of_Mind's post in particular explains the meaning of each of the data fields, which includes the system time, the XYZ coordinates in the earth-centered earth-fixed (ECEF) coordinate system, the loss of precision due to unfavorable GPS satellite positions and the number of GPS satellites currently received.

Another user /u/softwaresaur even notes that there was an "radiation_fdir_activation_guard" event. FDIR stands for Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery (FDIR) and this event was triggered due to 0.06 s mission time discrepancy between the rocket and GPS true time.

SpaceX Falcon 9 Telemetry Downlink Decoded

DragonOS: Decoding FT8 on Linux with WSJT-X

DragonOS is a ready to use Ubuntu Linux image that comes preinstalled with multiple SDR program. The creator of DragonOS, Aaron, uploads various YouTube tutorials showing how to use some of the preinstalled software. This month one of his tutorials covers how to use a SDRplay RSP1A or a HackRF to receive and decode FT8 with the preinstalled software WSJT-X or JS8Call. Aaron also notes that an RTL-SDR could also be used as the SDR.

In the video he covers how to set up a virtual audio cable sink in Linux for getting audio from GQRX into WSJT-X, setting up rigctld to allow WSJT-X to control GQRX, configuring GQRX, CubicSDR and WSJT-X, and finally downloading and using GridTracker.

DragonOS Focal Receive FT8 w/ WSJT-X (RSP1A, HackRF One, GQRX, CubicSDR, GridTracker)

SignalsEverywhere: Installing and Configuring OP25 Phase 1 & 2 Digital Voice Decoder on Linux

In this weeks video Sarah from the SignalsEverywhere YouTube channel show us how to install and configure the OP25 software on a Linux machine. OP25 is a Linux based P25 digital voice decoder which works with RTL-SDR dongles. It is capable of decoding both Phase 1 and Phase 2 systems. Installation is fairly simple via an installation script, but it does take some time to install. After installation Sarah shows how to configure the software in order to properly follow a trunked P25 system. In order to help with importing talkgroup information from a premium RadioReference account Sarah has also created an automatic importer Python script which is very useful.

OP25 Installation and Configuration Tutorial | Setup OP25 P25 Phase 1 and 2 SDR Decoder on Linux Pi

Hacking a Ceiling Fan Radio Control Signal with an RTL-SDR

Over on YouTube "River's Educational Channel" has uploaded a video showing how he was able to reverse engineer the wireless control signal from his ceiling fan remote, and use that information to create a new transmitter controlled via his smart home's Raspberry Pi.

In the video River uses an RTL-SDR and the Spektrum software to initially identify the remotes frequency, before moving on to record the signal in Universal Radio Hacker (URH). He then goes on to reverse engineer the signal and determine the binary control string for each button on the ceiling fan's remote control.

In part 2 which is yet to be released River will show how to transmit this signal via his Raspberry Pi 3B in order to integrate it with his smart home.

Hacking My Ceiling Fan Radio Signal With a $15 USB TV Tuner (RTL2832U)

Using SDR to Investigate Telemetry Still Broadcasting from 1960’s Satellite Transit-5B5

Thank you to Derek @ok9sgc for pointing us to some work Reddit user u/Xerbot has been doing on receiving telemetry coming down from a "dead" 1960's satellite called Transit-5B5. The fleet of Transit satellites was used for military navigation with the first launch in 1959 and the last in 1988. All in the fleet have since died apart from Transit-5B5 which continues to transmit telemetry at 137 MHz when receiving power from in the sun. Derek writes:

Turns out that the TRANSIT 5B-5 satellite's telemetry still has signs of some of the satellite's systems operating (albeit with a questionable reliability). The satellite represents an amazing legacy for all the people that worked on it in the 1950s and 60s, but due to its age it is also very difficult to find technical documentation about the telemetry (or I should rather say impossible), so to make sense of the data that's being broadcast by the satellite would require many people receiving, decoding, and comparing their results, mainly to identify any patterns in the satellite's behavior and the resulting demodulated data.

Derek and u/Xerbot are asking the SDR community to help collect more sample data, which might help in finding a way to decode some of the telemetry. If you have data to contribute, you can contact @ok9sgc on Twitter, and u/Xerbot on Reddit.

This reminds us of an old post from reader happysat where he demonstrated with an RTL-SDR that many "dead" satellites are actually still transmitting telemetry. Due to suspected chemical breakdown of the onboard batteries, the satellites tend to turn themselves on again when the solar panels receive sunlight.

The Transit-5B5 Satellite Telemetry Signal at 137 MHz

SignalsEverywhere: A Front End GUI Control Head for OP25

Sarah from the SignalsEverywhere YouTube channel is back and this time showing off a new program she has created called "Pi25" or "OP25 Mobile Control Head". The program is a Python GUI for OP25 which runs on almost any platform including Android and Windows. OP25 is an advanced open source digital voice P25 Phase 2 capable decoder which can be used with an RTL-SDR and run on a Raspberry Pi.

Sarah's GUI software allows information from the OP25 software to be displayed on a nice large Android tablet screen, as well as having scanner forward/back buttons, and talkgroup skip and hold controls. This is very useful for in-car control on a mobile setup.

Sarah notes that she is also considering running a Kickstarter for a physical hardware OP25 head unit controller so please let her know in the YouTube video comments if you are interested.

P25 Police Scanner Control Head OP25 SDR Raspberry Pi or Android GUI Front-End

Frugal Radio: SDR Guide Ep 9 – P25 LSM Trunking with one RTL-SDR V3 and DSDPlus

In his latest episode of his SDR Guide series Rob from Frugal Radio provides a walkthrough on using DSDPlus Fastlane to decode trunked P25 with just one RTL-SDR V3 dongle. In the video he explains each of the various DSDPlus windows, and demonstrates decoding of a Simulcast system in his area.

DSDPlus is a program capable of decoding various digital audio protocols such as DMR and P25. The "Fastlane" version is a $25 paid upgrade which allows you to download the latest version that contains more features.

2021 SDR Guide Episode 9 : $25 DSDPlus P25 LSM trunking walkthrough using 1 x $25 RTL-SDRv3