RUDAK Information
RUDAK is the digital module aboard the AMSAT AO-40 satellite (pre launch name was P3d). For general information about RUDAK and AO-40 see http://www.amsat.org/.
RUDAK STATUS: The current status of the RUDAK module can be found here.
RUDAK Telemetry Summary: The telemetry from RUDAK is described in this document.
RUDCOEFX.: The coefficients used to turn the raw telemetry data sent from the satellite into the engineering units (meaningful measurements) are found in this text document You can download that file from this page or from http://www.amsat.org/. The file is designed to be read into telemetry decoding software. Parameters are positional. Updates will appear here and on www.amsat.org. Any software for decoding and displaying RUDAK telemetry should be designed to read that file to allow the end user to do updates without having to obtain a new release of the program.
WD0E S band receive dish: Some views of the 4.5' S band dish in use at WD0E for RUDAK 9k6 receive are here.
Whole Orbit Data (WOD): The first look at one orbit worth of temperatures from the CAN/LAN nodes in AO-40. This is a binary file of WOD. Programmers are needed to write an application to decode and extract the data.
The format of the header is:
4 bytes, start time as DOS time_t
4 bytes, stop time as DOS time_t
2 bytes collection interval in seconds. In the example it is 0x3C or decimal 60 seconds
1 byte number of channels. In the example file it is 0x10 or decimal 16 channels
n bytes channel list. n = number of channels above. In the example the channels are from 0x2F to 0x3E. These channels correspond to those in the RUDCOEFX file.
The data section follows. Each channel is two bytes. Channels are in order as they appear in the RUDCOEFX file. In the example channel 2E with a value of 0x0268 is followed by channel 30 with a value of 0x0231 etc. The remainder of the data for the channels in the list follows. After channel 3E the data for channel 2F 60 seconds later is stored, followed by channel 30, etc. You must calculate the time stamps for each sample set after the first using the start time and the interval. The calculated time stamp for the last sample should equal the stop time in the header (within one interval).
Jim White
last update 5/15/2001