Hey all! I’ve always loved space, and after reading NASA’s Cubesat 101 on a flight to Disneyland, it seemed like a fun multi-year project would be to launch my own cubesat. My hope is that after getting far enough through the project, I will be able to go back through these blog posts to condense them into some sort of coherent syllabus or lab project for a school, or at least serve as a practical how-to guide.

According to the PDF, one of the initial things to work on is to have a functioning ground station and practice talking to satellites with it. Which brings us to Software Defined Radio. As an inexpensive way to capture and replay slices of RF spectrum, playing with SDR seems like good starting point to building a ground station. While AWS has launched a “virtual” ground station, understanding how this works and being able to test “in-house” seems important.

To that end, so far I’ve:

  • bought an rtl-sdr kit and plugged it into an iMac.
  • built / installed libusb in Xcode SDK.
  • built / installed rtl-sdr in Xcode SDK.
  • built / installed rtl_fm
  • captured a few seconds of KQED wideband monaural FM and converted the raw 16b samples to an AAC audio file with CoreAudio.

Next steps include:

  • work through signal processing class from MIT OpenCourseware.
  • add support for RDS and Stereo FM to practice signal processing.
  • practice receiving and decoding weather satellite and slow scan tv images
  • get a ham radio license for transmit capability
  • actually building that ground station