Es'hail-2 Transceiver

Communication setup For Radio Amateur

An Article by Tobias Mädel, Talweg 1, 31061 Alfeld (Leine)

ES'HAIL 2 / QO-100. THE GEO STATIONARY

SATELLITE ES'HAIL-2 CARRYING AMATEUR
RADIO TRANSPON DERS LA UN CHED FROM
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER AT 20:46 GMT ON
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2018 AND IS NOW
IN A GEOSTATIONARY ORBIT AT 25.9° EAST.
 INTRODUCTION

QO-100, also known as Es'hail-2 is a geostationary amateur radio satellite.It can be

used by large parts of the world, including Europe, Africa, (parts of) South America
and Asia.The satellite works as a linear transponder. It receives a specific range in
the 2.4 GHz (13cm) band and sends it back to earth on 10 GHz (3cm).In order to
generate such a 2.4 GHz signal and transmit it to the satellite conventional radio
technology with transverters could be used. I chose a different route and planned a
fully software-defined setup.

This has many advantages:

— Cost (PlutoSDRs can be bought for ~120€)
AARL-KL President : Rajasekharan Nair (VU2RJR +91 99958 28660)

— Low power consumption (laptop, SDR, amplifiers), ideal for portable usage
— No SSB transceiver needed
| Secretory : Nishath AK (VU3MOE - +91 70124 14506)
| Vice President : Biju GT (VU2HBI - +91 944745 1144)

— Software DSP processing for very clean signals

— I/Q samples can be transmitted over Ethernet instead of running long, lossy runs
of coaxial cable.

SDR hardware
We chose to use a PlutoSDR as it is modern, can be connected to an Ethernet link,
full duplex and widely supported by popular software (including my own).

Other SDRs like the LimeSDR, rad1o and HackRF were evaluated and tested as well:
The HackRF had problems with LO leakage, while the LimeSDR could only provide -
0.58dBm output power and had bad software support. The PlutoSDR can output a
maximum power level of about 6.5dBm, which is enough to drive a PSA4-5043+ or
the CN0417.

SDR software
On the software-side of things, a DIY SSB modulator with GNU Radio was build and
tested, but had high latency and suffered from occasional buffer overflows. This
wasn't ideal, especially for digital signals like FT8.

F4EXB's SDRangel can run on Linux and has nice modulators for SSB and other
modes.
G4ELI's SDR Console runs very well on Windows and has features like an excellent
voice DSP for SSB.

Frequency stability
To operate with 3kHz wide signals at 2400 MHz you'll need to have a very accurate
and stable frequency reference in your setup. With a known good frequency
reference, transponder operation can be as simple as transmitting on the RX
frequency - SAT LO (8089.5 MHz). Es'hail-2 is located in geostationary orbit, so there
is no doppler-correction needed. Correcting the TX frequency by whistling or CW
carrier is frowned upon and disturbs other users.

In order to ensure a proper frequency reference I modified the PlutoSDR to add a

reference input.

Amplification
When initially planning the setup, We used a LNA4ALL (PSA4-5043+-based) as my
first amplifier stage. Thankfully, around the same time AD released the CN0417 USB
Powered 2.4 GHz RF Power Amplifier. It can deliver a lot of output power (almost
+28dBm), which is useful to fully drive the second amplifier stage.

While illegal for their intended use, chinese WiFi booster amplifiers are great for
usage in ham radio usage.
The EDUP EP-AB003 has a claimed output power of 8W and realistically delivers
about 2W. I paid 30€ for a second hand unit. Because these devices are intended to
be used with 802.11 signals, they have great linearity and stability. They do need to
be modified though, inside the device is an RX/TX switch which is activated via HF-
VOX. This is unusable for SSB signals.

The modification shown in my pictures worked for me and some other people, but
wasn't 100% reliable, which is why I would recommend doing the
modification proposed by M1GEO: bridging the VSS and IN2+ pins of the AD4851-4
opamp.

The EP-AB003 could output +34dBm when driven into saturation. Pay attention to
the connector types, both RP-SMA and SMA are used on the WiFi booster and in
the supplied cables. Do not mix them up, as it could destroy the equipment.

Filtering
In order to suppress LO 3rd harmonics (~6 GHz) and other out-of-band products, I'm
using a band pass filter after the amplifier stages. The CN0417 already has an
internal filter, but I wanted an additional filter after the WiFi booster PA. This filter
has the same RP-SMA connectors like the PA and is called taoglas Airvu BPF.24
2.4GHz.
WiFi antenna
TP-Link TL-ANT2424B are cheap WiFi dish antennas with high gain. These are
specified at 24dBi gain. QO-100 expects a right-hand circular polarised (RHCP) uplink
signal, but this antenna is linearly polarized. This causes a loss of 3dB over an RCHP
antenna, but is still good enough.

Dual band feed

G0MJW, PA3FYM and M0EYT designed a fantastic dual band patch antenna.
OE8HSR provided me with the precision machined parts and an assembly manual.

With this antenna a regular satellite TV dish can be used for full duplex operation.

Reference and How to Make this Antenna from here.

http://www.oe8hsr.at/blog/wp-content/uploads/Manuals/BuildingThePlates.pdf
http://www.oe8hsr.at/blog/wp-content/uploads/Manuals/PatchFeedAssembly.pdf

Remote operation
One extremely useful advantage of the PlutoSDR is it's Zynq processor and FPGA
core. It runs Linux and can be SSH'ed into, flashed with alternative firmware and
modified in a lot of ways. It is possible to connect a USB-Ethernet adapter via an
USB-OTG cable to the PlutoSDR. This makes it possible to use the radio over a long
distance and even over existing network infrastructure. I can recommend adapters
with an ASIX AX88179 chipset (CSL-USB3.0 brand).

Portable operation with battery power is easily possible, because all components
need either 12V or 5V. I'm supplying the setup with a Li-Ion 3S (11.1V) battery pack
and stepping the voltage down with a modified Aukey car USB charger.
Receive
In order to receive Es'hail-2, a regular Ku-band satellite TV LNB can be used. I used a
Octagon OSLO PLL LNB, bought for about 10€. It's internal clock is a 27 MHz crystal,
which was replaced with some RG174 coaxial cable. To generate a very stable 27
MHz reference clock, I used the GPS reference again. The clock signal gets divided
into 2 seperate signals, one for the PlutoSDR and one for the LNB. Normally the
PlutoSDR requires a 40 MHz reference clock for the AD936x, but this can be changed
with a bootloader environment variable. Both devices can now use the same supply
signal. The LNB gets powered via a Bias-Tee, "Axing TZU 15-02" power injector.
Receive polarisation can be switched by changing the input voltage from 12V
(vertical) to 18V (horizontal). SDR Console can be set up with the correct LOs for TX
and RX and will handle all the frequency conversion automatically.

Summary
Es'hail-2 is a fantastic satellite with lots of potential for experiments. QRPp operation
is easily possible and a lot of fun. Alternative 2.4 GHz antenna designs can also be
tested and used. I quickly worked 31 stations, all in SSB, some in India, Brazil and
Mauritius. The 2W power output is sufficient for 59 signal reports and clear
transmission.

Hans, OE8HSR has written an excellent guide about QO-100 with best operating
practices and tips

Modification of the PlutoSDR to add a reference input.

Warning! This modification voids the warranty and can operate the transceiver
outside of it's absolute maximum ratings!

The PlutoSDR has an internal XO (Rakon RXO3225M 40.000 MHz), which has
excellent qualities like very low jitter.
Unfortunatly for ham radio use, the absolute accuracy (PPM) and stability isn't great.
When generating signals in the GHz-range (like a TX-signal for QO-100 at 2.4 GHz)
the error can multiply up to several kHz, much more than the signal bandwidth itself.

To fix this issue, I modified my PlutoSDR to accept an external 40 MHz reference

clock signal.
This signal is provided by a LeoBodnar Mini GPS Reference Clock, which has an
adjustable output frequency and is pretty much perfect for this application.

The AD9363 transceiver chip only requires a very low signal input. Ideally you would
install 2 fast antiparallel diodes to clamp the voltage to a maximum of about 0.7V.
My modification is a bit rough and may damage the chip in the long run, but it works
fine for now.
PlutoSDRs are factory calibrated to their own XOs. When using an external reference
clock you'll need to set xo_correction = 40000000 in the config.txt.

Alternative reference frequencies

The PlutoSDR can accept a wide range of input reference frequencies between 10
MHz and 80 MHz. This can be useful if you want to use a regular 10 MHz lab
reference or want to share the same GPSDO between a PlutoSDR and a satellite LNB
(which commonly use ~27 MHz).

After logging into the PlutoSDR either via SSH (192.168.2.1 root/analog) or serial
console, the following commands can be used to set the reference clock:

fw_setenv adi_loadvals "fdt addr ${fit_load_address} && fdt get value

fdt_choosen /configurations/${fit_config}/ fdt && fdt get addr fdtaddr
/images/${fdt_choosen} data && fdt addr ${fdtaddr}; if test ! -n
${ad936x_skip_ext_refclk}; then if test -n ${ad936x_custom_refclk};
then fdt set /clocks/clock@0 clock-frequency ${ad936x_custom_refclk};
elif test -n ${ad936x_ext_refclk}; then fdt set /clocks/clock@0 clock-
frequency ${ad936x_ext_refclk}; fi; fi; if test -n ${model}; then fdt
set / model ${model}; fi; if test -n ${attr_name} && test -n
${attr_val}; then fdt set /amba/spi@e0006000/ad9361-phy@0 ${attr_name}
${attr_val}; fi"
fw_setenv ad936x_custom_refclk "<25000000>"

These (rather unwieldy) commands will change the behaviour of the bootloader at
startup. Normally the u-boot looks for a special variable
called ad936x_ext_refclk which is set in the factory and contains an individually
calibrated value for each PlutoSDR. This value then gets loaded into the device tree.
We modify that behaviour so that we can set our own ad936x_custom_refclk variable
with a custom value.
Note: The < >-characters around the frequency are mandatory.

To check if our changes were successful, we can read the device-tree:

cat /proc/device-tree/clocks/clock@0/clock-frequency | xxd

# 00000000: 017d 7840 .}x@

Hex 017d 7840 is 25000000 in decimal, so our custom frequency was successfully
applied.
Reference and How to Make this Antenna from here.
http://www.oe8hsr.at/blog/wp-content/uploads/Manuals/BuildingThePlates.pdf
http://www.oe8hsr.at/blog/wp-content/uploads/Manuals/PatchFeedAssembly.pdf

Components and Antenna Shop

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32991723866.html (Long Range 17dBi 2.4G WIFI Wireless
Grid Parabolic Antenna N Female for 2.4G 2.4Ghz )

https://www.mouser.in ADALM-PLUTO , Search for this part no 584-ADALM-PLUTO

and 584-EVAL-CN0417-EBZ for 2.4 GHz Power Amp (https://www.analog.com/en/design-

center/reference-designs/hardware-reference-design/circuits-from-the-
lab/CN0417.html#rd-description)

Es'hail-2 Oscar 100 Dual Band Patch Antenna

https://uhf-satcom.com/blog/patch_antenna