How to send us received data packets?

You managed to receive telemetry packets from PicSat? Great! We would appreciate that you take a little bit more time to send them to us. We promise that we will make good use of them!

Beacons received all over the world are especially useful to monitor the status of satellite along its orbit (and not just when it is above our own station). Science data are obviously useful for the science mission. And all other packets, even when they do not look like much, can be of great importance! For example, we often receive satellite acknowldgements to our commands from ground station in France or Europe which are listening at the same time as us. It may look useless, but it is not. We regularly miss those packets ourselves, so it is good to have other people receiving them and sending them to us.

Three ways to send us your data

There are 3 ways you can use to send us data packets. All of them are (or will be) available on your profile tab.

• Fast upload beacon: mainly intended as a way to directlty upload a beacon by copy/paste when you receive, and to get an immediate overview of the satellite status. When you are a new user, this is also the only way you can upload a packet. Upload one beacon successfully, and you will have access to the other methods!
• Upload data: this can be used to upload files containing multiple packets at once. The files are stored on our servers, and processed daily.
• SiDS requests: This will be implemented in the near future.

Fast upload beacon

This page accepts a hexadecimal string, like "0123456789ABCDEF" in which whitespaces and upper/lower case are ignored ("01 23 45 67 89 ab cd ef", or even something like "0 1 234 56789 aBc dEf" will be accepted).
The hexadecimal string must represent the AX.25 packet (without flags), possibly KISS encapsulated (starting with "C0 00" and ending with "C0")

Here is an example of a valid packet:
AX.25: a0 92 86 a6 82 a8 e0 a0 92 86 a6 82 a8 65 03 f0 09 01 d0 1a 00 6c 44 8d 04 88 33 f6 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 b0 02 b3 07 ca 06 64 05 a8 0d d9 04 28 09 8e 00 04 00 04 03 1f aa 00 00 00 01 00 02 03 19 00 00 00 00 bd bb 63 8c 3f 83 99 45 3c 02 cc fb be 3e b8 3c 3c a9 b2 80 bc 17 eb d2 3e 32 d0 18 00 00 00 00 00 05 60 fa fc 13 00 b5 51 70 99 56 00 6a 00 00 00 0c d3
KISS encapsulated: c0 00 a0 92 86 a6 82 a8 e0 a0 92 86 a6 82 a8 65 03 f0 09 01 d0 1a 00 6c 44 8d 04 88 33 f6 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 b0 02 b3 07 ca 06 64 05 a8 0d d9 04 28 09 8e 00 04 00 04 03 1f aa 00 00 00 01 00 02 03 19 00 00 00 00 bd bb 63 8c 3f 83 99 45 3c 02 cc fb be 3e b8 3c 3c a9 b2 80 bc 17 eb d2 3e 32 d0 18 00 00 00 00 00 05 60 fa fc 13 00 b5 51 70 99 56 00 6a 00 00 00 0c d3 c0

Upon submission of the packet, you will have an immediate response of the server, telling you if the beacon is valid and, if so, a link to visualise its content.

Upload your data

This page can be used to upload multiple packets simultaneously. It is based on a simple "upload a file" feature, which sends the file to our server, in Meudon. There, an automated processing script is run daily (at 01:00:00 UTC), which extracts all data packets from the submitted files and send them to our database. All packets are assigned to the user who uploaded the file.
For our script to be able to extract the data, your files must follow one of the following formats:

• Archived binary files: an archive (".zip", ".rar", ".tar") containing multiple binary files, all with a ".bin" or ".packet" extension (to indicate that they are binary files). Each binary file must contain the raw data of only a single packet, which can be direclty the AX.25 packet (without flags), or the KISS ecapsulated AX.25 frame (starting with the hex "C0 00", and ending with "C0").
• Multiline text files: a text file (".txt" or ".hex" extension), containing one packet per line, in string hexadecimal (same as with the "fast upload beacon" page). Each packet can be direclty the AX.25 frame (without flags), or the KISS ecapsulated AX.25 frame (starting with the hex "C0 00", and ending with "C0"). You should avoid adding empty lines in your file (at the end or between packets). The file can of course be single line if you have only one packet.
• Archive of text files: text files (see above) can be grouped together in a ".zip", ".rar", or ".tar" archive, to be uploaded simultaneously.

You can download here an archive containing an example of each accepted formats.

SiDS interface

The documentation for the PicSat SiDS interface is available at this page