The Fox in a Box (FIAB) telemetry receiving system is a Raspberry Pi-based program that uses a Funcube Dongle SDR receiver to monitor, receive, decode and transfer telemetry data from the AMSAT Fox series of satellites. Once set up FIAB generally runs unattended, using each Fox satellites Keplerian elements to predict the timing and Doppler-corrected frequency of the pass. At the acquisition of signal (AOS) time the program will tune the SDR radio to the proper frequency and begin listening for the data-under-voice (DUV) or less common high-speed telemetry data. The “Input” screen shows the satellites being tracked along with their current azimuth and elevation and Doppler frequency correction. It also shows the signals in the bandpass and an eye diagram of telemetry currently being received.

When a signal is received the program will decode it on the satellite-specific screen and will automatically upload the decoded results to the AMSAT data warehouse. In this way AMSAT can monitor the health and condition of its satellites from different locations as they circle the earth.

Many FIAB stations use omnidirectional antennas, but the Skunkworks FIAB station splits the feedline from the SatNOGS yagi antennas and feeds the FIAB and NOAA WeFax receivers as well as the SatNOGS SDR receiver. We program SatNOGS to follow all of the Fox and NOAA satellites so that the antennas are properly aimed at these satellites. This allows us to utilize directional antennas for FIAB and NOAA even though we’re not using those programs for antenna positioning. Using directional antennas provides us with far better telemetry downloads than using omni antennas.