Calling all radio amateurs! ESA is challenging anyone with amateur radio equipment to catch the first signals from OPS-SAT, ESA’s brand new space software laboratory.
On 17 December 2019, OPS-SAT will be launched into low-Earth orbit on a Soyuz rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, together with ESA’s Cheops exoplanet-hunter .
Once launched, the satellite will deploy its solar panels and ultra-high frequency antenna, and then start to send signals back home.
Could you be the first on Earth to catch them? ESA’s mission control team in Darmstadt are asking for your help to find the fledgling CubeSat.
More information about participation can be found here: http://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/Calling_radio_amateurs_help_find_OPS-SAT

The details¶

Lift-off is scheduled for 08:54:20 UTC on 17 December 2019. Deployment will begin 15044.6 seconds later (T+15044.6 seconds), expected to be at 13:05:04 UTC. OPS-SAT will begin transmitting 15 minutes after satellite deployment and after ultra-high frequency (UHF) antenna and solar array deployment have been confirmed. The first two passes over Europe are expected on the same evening.

To track OPS-SAT, a preliminary launch TLE is available here: https://opssat1.esoc.esa.int/tle.txt

Setup your own mission control system¶

The OPS-SAT flight control team has developed open source software which allows anyone to receive the UHF beacon of OPS-SAT and decode it. A set of ‘GnuRadio’ applications have been developed and are available here . You can use a wide range of ‘software-defined radios’ (SDR’s) supported by GNURadio to receive the UHF signal. The application toolkit consists of a receiver and demodulator flowgraph as well as a GUI telemetry desktop, parsing packets coming from space in real-time. The repository is located at: https://github.com/esa/gr-opssat