Recording of Hera X-band telemetry with the Allen Telescope Array shortly after launch (part 1/2)

This dataset contains an IQ recording of the X-band 8435.8 MHz telemetry signal from the Hera spacecraft done with the Allen Telescope Array starting 1 hour and 30 minutes after launch. Antenna 1a from the ATA was used in dual linear polarization (X and Y polarizations).

The hardware configuration was as follows: the antenna was connected to RFCB LO d, which was tuned to a frequency of 8435 MHz for one of the recordings and 8435.75 MHz for the other one, and used an output IF of 512 MHz. A USRP N321 digitized both polarizations of each antenna. The USRP used an external 10 MHz reference and PPS coming from the observatory distribution system, and LO sharing was set up among the two channels. The IQ sample rate of the USRP was 6.144 Msps, and a GNU Radio flowgraph was used to record IQ data to disk. The GNU Radio flowgraph stored the IQ data for each channel as 16-bin integers in the GNU Radio metatata file format, with detached headers. The header files are included in the dataset as .hdr files. After recording, the data was formatted in SigMF with the script do_sigmf.py.

Antenna pointing was done manually by trying to maximize the received signal power, since the ephemerides publicly available when the launch happened differed greatly from the true launch trajectory. As a consequence, there is signal fading when the antenna is not pointed correctly.

This dataset is part 1/2. It contains two recordings of the low rate telemetry signal. Part 2/2 contains a recording of the high rate telemetry signal.