SatNOGS-COMMS

SatNOGS COMMS is an open-source and open-hardware, dual-band, software-configurable radio transceiver designed for satellite applications and telemetry/telecommand (TMTC). Suitable for SmallSats and CubeSats, it was co-funded by ESA and LSF under the scope of an ESA GSTP Element 2 project. It has flight heritage on the Curium-1 (Q3 2024) and PHASMA (Q4 2025) missions and is expected to be commissioned on the HELEO mission. The radio is based on the AT86RF215 integrated circuit enabling versatile, software-defined operations of two frequency bands simultaneously. It supports, among other bands, the VHF (100-200 MHz), UHF (400-435 MHz), GSM (868-915 MHz) and S-Band (2025-2110, 2200-2290 MHz and amateur band). Both frontends offer up to 32 dBm transmit power, complying with SFCG21–2R4 emissions standard. Furthermore, it supports modulation and framing schemes including GMSK/GFSK, BPSK, and QPSK and provides an I/Q SDR interface with sampling rates up to 4 MSPS and user-defined low-pass filtering. To extend these capabilities, an onboard ZYNQ 7020 DSP co-processor utilizes the I/Q interface to implement complex CCSDS, IEEE 802.15.4 and AX.25 modulation and coding schemes that are not natively available in the AT86RF215 modem. The onboard firmware is built on the Zephyr RTOS, an open-source real-time operating system that provides a robust, platform-agnostic framework for hardware control and multitasking. This software foundation facilitates reliable over-the-air updates and simplifies the integration of mission-specific code.

• Bootloader
• Building and flashing the firmware
• Configuration and customization
• Development
• Testing
• Supportive Equipment

The following sections outline the core components of the SatNOGS-COMMS Firmware:

• Radio and RF-frontend
• Exceptions subsystem
• Board Support Package (BSP)
• Digital Signal Processing (DSP)
• Power subsystem
• Persistent settings subsystem
• Temperature subsystem

Website and Contact

For more information about the project and Libre Space Foundation please visit our site and our community forums. You can also chat with the SatNOGS-COMMS development team at #satnogs-comms:matrix.org

License

© 2019-2020 Libre Space Foundation.