[amsat-bb] New Telemetry Decoder for FalconSat-3

[Chris Thompson]

I've written a new Ground station for FalconSat-3. If you had an initial go
with WISP without success or if you have never tried to decode FalconSat-3,
now is a good time to try.  This requires much less setup than WISP.  And
don't be put off if you don't have a hardware TNC, this will work with a
soundcard TNC. Or, if you didn't try to listen to FalconSat-3 because you
don't have a station that can transmit commands to the spacecraft, then
read on. We still need your help to decode telemetry.

In particular we would like to encourage people to download the Telemetry
and forward it to an AMSAT telemetry server.  Currently more telemetry is
generated than we can download with AMSAT Operations ground stations.
Receive only stations can contribute to that as well as stations equipped
to transmit to FalconSat-3 and request files.  You can see telemetry
uploaded so far here: http://tlm.amsatfox.org/tlm/FalconSat-3

There are details about the spacecraft, how to install the software and how
it works in the manual available if you download the software or online
here: http://www.g0kla.com/pacsat/pacsat_ground_manual.pdf

You can download the software at www.g0kla.com/pacsat/index.php.  I have
also written some blog posts and thoughts about the software for anyone
interested.  They are linked from the download page.

There is much to do here of course and most of it probably won't get done.
I would call this a beta release.  If you have suggestions or bug fixes
please log them online at https://github.com/ac2cz/Falcon/issues or send me
an email.

The software is open source.  All the details are here:
https://github.com/ac2cz/Falcon/  The telemetry processing and display
leverages common code from FoxTelem in a library here:
https://github.com/ac2cz/libTelem/



-- 
Chris E. Thompson
chrisethompson at gmail.com
g0kla at arrl.net