In this blog post, I’ll talk about my experiments with Software Defined Radar. This concept implies that radar systems can be simplified by abstracting analog hardware in favor of software implementations performing Digital Signal Processing inside a processor module. This is useful for aerospace applications. It lowers the complexity of the radar system consequently reducing the maintenance, weight and the probability of something misbehave in-flight. After reading about that, I wondered if it was possible to make something similar to reduce the number of expensive analog front-end parts needed for a radar system.

In this post, I’ll detail how I managed to reverse engineer the telemetry signal from GOES-16 — NOAA’s third generation geosynchronous weather satellite built by Lockheed Martin and launched into space by ULA’s Altas V rocket. GOES-16 Telemetry Being Demodulated and Decoded. This satellite is mostly known by the HRIT signal, responsible to distribute high-resolution meteorological data to hundreds of institutions throughout the portion of the earth illuminated by the spacecraft.