Iridium Satellite System

What is an Iridium Satellite?

● Owned by Iridium Communications
○ Built by Motorola
● Primarily used for Emergency or Maritime
Telecommunications
○ Voice and Pages
● Can be used for TCP/IP and other lesser
used protocols
● Can be used anywhere in the world by
Iridium Phones, Pagers, etc…
○ Expensive Hardware
○ Truly Global (Polar Orbiting)
Reaching Iridium
● Fairly Low Orbit
● 66 Active Satellites
○ 6 Spare Satellites in Orbit
Receiving Iridium - Hardware
● Most SDRs (Software Defined Radio)
○ RTL-SDR (pagers)
○ hackRF
○ bladeRF
○ Anything that can capture 10mhz
bandwidth in the L band
● Active or Passive Antenna
○ GPS antennas (modified) (active)
○ Patch (passive)
○ Commercial
○ RHCP 1618.85 to 1626.5 mhz
● A semi-modern Linux machine
○ Can be CPU intensive and variable
Receiving Iridium - Software
● Linux with installed GNU radio
○ It's possible to use on windows (not fun)
● Gr-iridium (GNU radio-iridium)
○ Dumps RAW packets into a text file
● OsmoSDR
● Iridium-Toolkit
○ Interprets the RAW packets
● AMBE voice codec
○ Emulation
■ Runs closed source firmware from a phone
○ Opensource
■ http://git.osmocom.org/osmo-ir77/tree/codec
Links / Sources
● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvKaC4pNvck
○ Great Talk at HOPE XI where I learned most of my information
○ Also great slides
● http://ccar.colorado.edu/asen5050/projects/projects_2007/jayne_proj/
● Wikimedia
○ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation\
● https://github.com/muccc/iridium-toolkit
● https://github.com/muccc/gr-iridium
● http://wiki.muc.ccc.de/iridium:start?redirect=1
○ Shows great antenna options