Documentation for the Lime Microsystems LMS8001 Companion Board has now been made publicly available, including full details on what’s changed since its limited production run in 2017.
“We are pleased to announce that documentation for LMS8001 Companion has now been published,” Lime Micro’s Andrew Back wrote in the latest campaign update on Crowd Supply, “and this includes details such as block diagrams, operating instructions, connector pinouts, design updates made since the limited 2017 release, and software support.”
First released as a limited run in 2017 and now fully updated for production, the LMS8001 Companion Board is built around Lime Micro’s LMS8001A radio-frequency integrated circuit (RFIC) and provides a way to extend the coverage of any LimeSDR hardware up to an official limit of 10GHz – though with tests showing usable performance up to 10.5GHz for those looking to tune in to the 3cm band.
Following a successful crowdfunding campaign for a new production run of the enhanced design, the LMS8001 Companion Board now has a documentation page here on MyriadRF – including a look at the hardware design, changes since the earlier release, and the LMS8 Suite software used to control it.
All documentation is available here on MyriadRF; although the crowdfunding campaign has now closed, boards are still available to purchase via Crowd Supply.
Embedded systems developer Anders Nielsen has designed a software-defined radio with a twist: it’s driven by the MOS Technology 6502, a 1970s-era microprocessor more commonly associated with early Apple, Commodore, and Nintendo devices.
“This little eight-bit CPU powered the Apple I & II, Commodore 64, Atari consoles, and even the [Nintendo] NES,” Anders explains of the 50-year-old 6502. “For many, it was the chip that introduced the world to affordable personal computing. And now, half a century later, it’s back – this time running the front end of my homemade SDR.
“Think of an SDR as the Swiss Army knife of radios. Instead of filling a workbench with dedicated devices, like a garage door opener, a satellite receiver, and a shortwave set, you just plug in an SDR and let software do the heavy lifting. Tuning, filtering, demodulating is all handled by code.
“When I first powered it up, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But sure enough, with an antenna hooked up, I could tune into the 40-metre ham band,” Anders says of the PhaseLoom SDR. “It’s rough, noisy, and very much a prototype – but it works. A 6502-powered SDR is alive.
“Most SDRs today rely on powerful modern processors or FPGAs. Running one from a CPU designed in 1975 is absolutely ridiculous – and that’s exactly why it’s so fun. The 6502 may not be doing the heavy DSP [Digital Signal Processing] (yet), but it’s orchestrating the whole show. And with more development, I plan to push it further – maybe even squeezing in some real signal processing routines on that ancient silicon.”
More information is available on Anders’ blog, while hardware design files and GNU Radio flowgraphs are available on GitHub under an unspecified open-source licence.
NASA is looking to keep a close eye on its upcoming crewed Artemis II Orion mission to the Moon – and has opened a call for volunteers to help track the craft and its occupants.
A test flight of the NASA Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft is scheduled for no later than April 2026, in which astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will spend ten days travelling to the moon, around it, and back again, under the watchful eye of the Near Space Network and Deep Space Network – but they won’t be the only things watching, as NASA requests volunteers turn their ground antennas to the skies too in order to see what they can do.
“By offering this opportunity to the broader aerospace community, we can identify available tracking capabilities outside the government,” says NASA’s Kevin Coggins of the plan. “This data will help inform our transition to a commercial-first approach, ultimately strengthening the infrastructure needed to support Artemis missions and our long-term Moon to Mars objectives.”
The call for participation, which follows a similar effort during the Artemis I mission in 2022, is open to everyone from other international space agencies to academic institutions, commercial ventures, non-profits, and individual private citizens interested in one-way Doppler measurements on the Orion S-band return link carrier signal.
Interested parties can find out how to apply to be part of the programme on SAM.GOV.
The Wow@Home project is also turning its eyes to the skies, building a little “Big Ear” out of Raspberry Pi single-board computers and software-defined radios in an attempt to replicate the reception of the “Wow! Signal” at Ohio State University in 1977.
“A network of small radio telescopes offers several distinct advantages compared to large professional observatories,” the project leaders explain Wow@Home, named for the famous SETI@Home distributed computing project. “These systems are low-cost and can operate autonomously around the clock, making them ideal for continuous monitoring of transient events or long-duration signals that professional telescopes cannot commit to observing full-time.
“The telescope is fixed at a constant elevation, pointed south, and scans a specific celestial declination over the course of one or more days using a wide field of view of approximately 25° (HPBW or its beamwidth). As the Earth rotates, this configuration allows the telescope to capture a continuous 360° strip of the sky at that declination. After completing three or more full-sky passes, the telescope is adjusted to a new elevation to begin scanning a different declination, gradually building up full-sky coverage over time.
“While optimised for educational use, this configuration also yields valuable data on RFI near the H I line in urban environments, helping us assess the likelihood of RFI mimicking a Wow!-like signal. Additionally, it serves as a practical platform for a wide-field search for strong transient events, whether of astrophysical origin or potential technosignatures.
“The Wow@Home Radio Telescope operates autonomously, 24/7, as a meridian-style instrument, conducting a continuous all-sky survey for transient events,” the researchers explain. “The hardware required to build these telescopes is both inexpensive and widely accessible, relying on readily available components.”
More details are available on the project website.
Pseudonymous YouTuber “Old Computers Sucked” offers a look at how software-defined radios of the past worked – by building a system for the reception and display of weather satellite data using only hardware which would have been available in 1994.
“I want to build everything I need to receive pictures of the earth from a satellite like it’s 1994,” the YouTuber explains by way of introduction to the project. “Which means, I’d like to only use information, tools, and materials that would’ve been available to a happy amateur in ’94.
“When reading about the World Wide Web I saw that there’s a website that could show you recent pictures of the Earth, and I wondered if I could do that too. With some digging, it seems the answer might be yes. Since the ’60s, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the USA, or NOAA, has had these satellites up in the sky that constantly beam down what they see in real-time. It’s sent on the VHF band with frequency modulation and the actual data signal is a fairly low bandwidth audio signal. After scouring BBSes and pestering radio amateurs I think I’ve figured out what I need.”
The heart of the system is a desktop computer, in fetching beige, built around an Intel 386 DX processor running at 33MHz with 5MB of memory, a Tseng Labs graphics card with 512kB of dedicated video RAM, a Creative Sound Blaster-compatible Orchid Sound Producer Pro soundcard, a 240MB Quantum Prodrive hard drive, 3.5″ and 5.52″ floppy drives, and a single-speed CD-ROM – exactly the sort of thing you may have been using to play Doom in 1994.
What it doesn’t include, though, is radio – nor a digitiser to get the signal from the radio into the computer. For the latter, period-appropriate software included a schematic for building the hardware you’d need; for the former, the YouTuber decided to build his own radio, based around the Motorola MC3362.
While the result wasn’t entirely successful – and certainly not up to what you can achieve with modern hardware and software – the process is definitely worth watching on the Old Computers Sucked YouTube channel.
LF Networking, a Linux Foundation subsidiary focused on open source networking, has announced a partnership with the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OSA) on an incubation project for open radio access network (RAN) technologies: DUranta.
“OpenAirInterface has been a partner of open RAN research and innovation,” says Linux Foundation’s Arpit Joshipura of the partnership. “By joining LF Networking, Duranta will expand its impact with increased industry engagement, and the opportunity to connect research-focused communities to a global open source networking ecosystem.”
“By supporting the creation of Duranta and seeding it with key cellular networking assets, OSA is stepping forward to support the long standing 5G Superblueprint ambitions of LFN,” adds OSA president Raymond Knopp. “With OAI software assets provided through Duranta, the community, particularly the industrial players, now has access to a full cellular framework including integration with LFN’s Nephio for CNF deployment and automation.
“We call upon the LFN members to join the efforts to strengthen the relationship with OSA by supporting its RAN stack development and radio CICD lab, a unique set of expertise developed and grown over two decades. Such commitment from LFN members will further ensure the much-needed industry alignment in Duranta and will enable delivery of mature, deployment-grade open RAN solutions, while keeping the academic and research collaborations, that have been OAI’s hallmark, strongly engaged for evolution of the CU/DU stack towards 6G.”
More information, including how to get involved, is available on the Duranta project page.
Metop Second Generation A1 (Metop-SGA1), the first in the EUMETSAT Polar System Second Generation constellation of polar-orbiating weather satellites, has begun transmitting data from two of its six instruments, just three weeks after launch.
“Receiving these first data so quickly is a thrilling achievement for EUMETSAT, particularly considering the technological sophistication of Metop-SGA1 and its payload,” says Phil Evans, EUMETSAT director-general. “In collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and our European industry partners, EUMETSAT teams are working intensely to render all the satellite’s instruments operational, and the fact that data is already flowing seamlessly from the MWS and the RO shows that we are firmly on the right track to having powerful, validated products ready for our user community in the planned timeframe.”
The two instruments currently transmitting are the microwave sounder (MWS), designed to detect temperature, humidity, precipitation, and ice-cloud formation with twice the resolution of its predecessor, and the radio occultation sounder (ROS), a limb-sounding instrument designed to capture 1,400 daily vertical profiles of temperature, humidity, and electron density profiles from the ionosphere – data which will be used to calibrate other instruments on the satellite.
“These first glimpses of data are extremely encouraging, and I want to thank all the teams who have contributed – both to developing the mission as a whole and to operating and commissioning Metop-SGA1 in orbit,” says ESA director of earth observation programmes Simonetta Cheli. “This is a major undertaking: six satellites in total, flying in successive pairs and delivering critical data for at least the next 20 years. While we closely monitor Metop-SGA1’s early performance, we are already in the final stages of preparing its companion, Metop-SGB1, for launch next year.”
More information is available on the EUMETSAT website.
Finally, Australia’s Space Industry – Responsive – Intelligent – Thermal (SpIRIT) nanosatellite has also been beaming back some data: its first-ever selfie from space.
“SpIRIT is a complex satellite designed and built in Australia, with many components flying for the first time and hosting a scientific instrument contributed by the Italian Space Agency,” explains project principal investigator Michele Trenti of the mission. “Now that SpIRIT has completed rigorous testing in space, we are confident it’s ready to commence the next phase of its mission, which is truly exciting.”
That mission will see SpIRIT used to scan space using its HERMES X-ray detector for gamma ray bursts, created when stars collide or die – acting as an early warning system for astronomers interested in studying the phenomenon. For now, though, its data was more mundane: a selfie, taken as it deployed the wings of its thermal management system.
“The SpIRIT mission has demonstrated the capability that exists within the Australian space sector – from building the satellite and testing new technologies in orbit and on ground, to hosting international science payloads and successfully completing its initial phase,” says Australian Space Agency head Enrico Palermo. “I commend the team, and our colleagues at the Italian Space Agency, on their persistent long-duration operations in space. SpIRIT is a great example of the mutual benefit that comes from collaborating in space.”
More information is available on the project website.