I think something important to note is that in a failure scenario for anything rocket related, often you might only receive one or two frames of data after things "go wrong" where you see things like the vehicle yawing or engines exploding. Those few frames are *super* important to diagnosing what went wrong, which is why we've been recording the telemetry as far back as we've had rocketry. The challenge then becomes that if you encrypt the stream, you add another layer of potential for that data to become unusable. Take any block cipher, for example (most ciphers in use today are block ciphers). These ciphers could encrypt the stream, sure, BUT at the cost of only being able to encrypt blocks of size X, where X is the size of the cipher, so 256-bits for AES-256. With that in mind, it's entirely possible that if a vehicle fails fast enough there's the possibility that some of that telemetry that _would have been able to be sent otherwise_ no longer gets sent because we were waiting for a few extra bytes to add to the stream. That possibility alone may be enough to give the engineers at SpaceX pause before implementing encryption into the telemetry stream.
Yes! That's why all that redundant data is not compressed. If a rocket explodes on the pad you can get that the last bits of telemetry and figure out the sequence of things getting torn apart. Very satisfying in a way.
And adding something you don't need adds weight and power consumption. Power is a premium commodity in space, and weight costs. Why spend money on encryption when you don't need to?
I hope you're right, but SN11's telemetry from yesterdays static fire is encrypted, so maybe they don't care about it, or they get the telemetry from a different downlink.
Me too! The whole time I'm thinking, 2.2 gig rf, yep, just about where microwaves ovens operate, yawn, downconverters, no biggie, forward error corrections, meh, data streams, boring, ascii decoding, so 80's...then we get WOW! Floating Oxygen Blobs! VERY COOL!
Its also amusing to see how many HAMs are following space stuff. I like to learn something new and exiting every day. Technology and science are always a part of the diet 😁 RUclips is full of trolls, but if you manage to filter them out, it can be a goldmine. I have been using meteors and the moon for communications on VHF, so even if we do have a ground based hobby, its really nice to know we are using some parts of space to bounce our signals off.
The trick is, that people, especially engineers, are lazy. Why reinvent the wheel? If there is an ISO or regional standard that applies, an engineer will probably use that. Same with libraries for the main programming languages. If you look at something that was created to be efficient, it drastically reduces the amount of ways it was possibly created. The shortest path between two points is always a straight line after all.
I once reverse engineered a toaster into all its original parts... never worked again but I learned that mom was emotionally attached to kitchen appliances😂
@@JainZar1 First we have punchcard programming. Then we had assembly programming. Then we had a C compiler. A few iterations later we had cloud applications running on VMs inside hypervisors in higly distributed environments created in some metaprogramming language which is popular this week. Of course we engineers are not going to reinvent the wheel. Nobody would use that wheel and it would be very expensive.
There's a lot of security though obscurity in space stuff. For good reason: if you lock your systems down too hard you risk denying legitimate access and it's not like you can go to the front panel on your satellite and hit the reset button. I played with satellite data for my Masters research. One satellite sent data that said "telemetry" but its owners refused to provide documentation so I reverse-engineered it. Used it to write a nice paper on long-term orbital changes (thus how long the satellite was in daylight each orbit) and how this correlated with the operating temperature of the satellite's systems.
around nasa they still fear that what they're building will end up being the next Saturn 5. An extremely good rocket that could not be made after few years because they forgot how
It's more a practical thing here if you want the video live over a potentially flaky radio link then encryption increases your risk of lost video, getting the content (or at least some of it) is probably considered more important than security particularly as downlink video is of little use other than maybe SOME commercial sensitivity or curious interest.
@@dallatorretdu Uhm no, we know exactly how to build a Saturn V, the difference is our industrial base has moved on from 1960s technology. The main challenge in a rocket is the propulsion system and there are numerous companies that could build large kerolox gas generator cycle engines at 1000psi if given the money.
anyone looking at SPFR- merger rumor news was released at bottom of market correction so im thinking it could be overlooked. bloomberg rumor to be merging with Velo3d - 3d metal printing company that supplies machines to SpaceX. I think once DA is confirmed we could see 20-50% pop at least... more revenue than desktop metal which reached a peak price of $34. you might want to add to watch list.
Wow, does the youtube comment algorithm loved typos? I've posted similar things on dozens of Scott's videos, and the one time I spell his name wrong it gets hundreds of thumbs up... Apologies Mr Manley
Really incredible work with the decoding part! For the curious viewer: the "downconverter" mentioned about three and a half minutes in works in a far simpler manner than you might expect: multiplying two waves produces a new signal containing waves formed from the sum and difference of their frequencies (if you've ever heard of "beat frequencies", this is it!) After a special low-noise amplifier, the incoming signal is mixed with a local oscillator of just the right frequency to "translate" the signal into the appropriate range, which is then passed to the SDR.
@@arkology_city I wouldn't call it super simple, but it was far simpler than I expected when I first read heard of upconverters. "What black magic could possibly be in one of these boxes?" I wondered. Turns out it's just trig identities.
Yes, it is. I remember the first time I saw it was during one of the Falcon 9 launches where a second or two of footage appeared on the screen and I wondered what I saw with amazed bewilderment. I would welcome more footage.
Sending things unencrypted "because nobody is listening/viewing anyway" is quite common, or at least it was. I remember many years ago it was possible to watch links from US drones back to their base on normal geostationary satellites in Ku-band. You would see the video footage of them flying over enemy territory. I have been viewing it for a couple of afternoons, I think it was at 37.5W. That is, until someone boasted about this on the BBC and they showed it on a news show. That was the end of that fun, it became encrypted. I expect a similar change on this transmission.
I remember seeing pals tweeting screenshots from a livestream of one of those receivers. Never bothered to check if it was actually real, had kind of thought it was a joke. Damn boasting on national TV, tho!
Part of the change was when Iran spoofed location and control data and recovered a UAV sometime before 2010. Now all the GPS is encrypted too, as well as up/down links.
They have but this was something more profound, as in a digital signal modulated onto a very high frequency. That is a bit harder to decode than an analogue signal, even though standards were used in constructing the digital signal (SpaceX). Had the coding standard been proprietary and kept secret, there would have been close to 0 chance they would be able to decode the signal.
I remember how a local computer magazine in 1990 had instructions on how to receive and decode weather satellite pictures with a Commodore 64 here in Finland. All you really needed was a cheap radio receiver, record the transmission to tape and read it with a C64 and a cheap AD converter.
I’m surprised that security is not more of a concern. Sure, you can’t do evil things with the downlink (except maybe learn some trade or state secrets), but what about sending commands to spacecraft? Are they unencrypted as well? Even if it’s encrypted, since this is the space industry they probably use 30 year old algorithms which could be cracked.
Surely you can't possibly think that you really are the only one thinking something like this to a Scott Manley video, can you? Surely you're just phrasing it like this for attention because you're an insecure little drama queen, aren't you? Also: whose* reaction
The reason you don’t want a whole bunch of low values is that it’s hard to keep your clock synched. Basically “was that 77 low values or 78 low values?” If you get that number wrong, your bit stream ends up off by one and screws up your decode.
I’d like to know the clock speeds they’re running during the flights and try and get the data too. Don’t know if my location would benefit and actually obtain on a fly-by before the loads are deployed. There would probably be some flights over my area eventually. Lol
@@petehaidinyak9084 - I remember being in Kwajalein Atoll for our missile test capturing telemetry back in the early 80’s, but most of the time we used just the radar returns to gather the most accurate data because we weren’t always able to keep locks on the telemetry. It wasn’t always a perfect systems operations in the hot humid weather. Kwajalein where America’s day begins.
More than just timing, data communication carriers in general use energy dispersal to ensure that there aren't long runs of ones and zeros and also for energy dispersal to make sure that the transmitted waveform doesn't suddenly go to essentially CW or otherwise cause high spectral density emissions in narrow chunks of the carrier band. This requirement relates to sharing frequency spectrum with other users and helps reduce interference between services and systems.
One of the people who did this, FelixTRG, is in the same fan SpaceX Discord server as me and he's been talking about how they accomplished this and it's super fascinating. super cool stuff.
Very impressive. GM4 HIG (no longer active). Brings me back to my Radio Amateur Microwave TV days when I used to send pictures over the North Sea from Southern Aberdeen with just 25 watts max ERP.
Well, I had just enough HF tech at university to know that I am not enough of a nerd for it. But this channel is awesome for the average space nerd, thx a lot Scott !
I’ve seen genius decapping integrated circuit and reverse engineering them but yeah, reverse engineering data stream is impressive. Check “Applied Science” and “CuriousMarc” just for a glimpse of decapping IC chips
3:26 Scott: The gizmo basicly works like this: It is a bandwidth problem. Simplified version is that stuff sent on lower frequencies will always have a lower theoretical transfer rate. But this gizmo can help by capturing data in higher bandwidths, and smear the same data out across more frequencies in a lower part of the spectrum while retaining the same amount of information. Depending on how far you shift the frequencies, you might have to filter to only a very narrow band of high frequency before shifting it down and smearing it out across a relatively large band in lower frequencies in order to retain the same amount of information. This is about as far as I understand it, but I hope it gives a clue at least.
@@brianroys1868 makes me think that they'll be able to figure out Raptor/Heavy Booster production in due course and be able to keep up with their own demand
@@brianroys1868 Well, its a pretty small active fleet of 7 Falcon 9 and 1 Falcon Heavy and theyre all either right back from a flight or planned for the next one. Their insane cadence might make it feel like there must be a lot of boosters but nope, they just got this fast with recovering them :D
As an engineer I am very interested by the oxygen tank video.. well done to these guys.. ingenuity is one of the few things that give me hope for our species..
Scott you are the one person I'll come to to hear about this type of stuff. Sure, you're not an RF expert but you seem to know enough about a whole lot of things that the main point and passion is communicated well. Cheers
I've been playing with images NOAA and METEOR sats for a while, If you've never done it, it's really cool to see a live image beamed from space to your own computer, but this is really impressive!
Something really cool about watching those older weather satellites. All they are doing is scanning what they see below them and streaming it as a continuous strip. Just scanlines with 2 images and sync columns.
@@JukentheBox I think you CAN get stuff from the planetlabs swarms, but I think it's just telemetry, at least it rigns a bell. there's loads of them that have telemetry signals in the clear. my microwave setup is pretty primitive at the mo so I've not done much to see what's up there lately.
@@pedromiranda5448 as in people who are not involved with the company. By 'reassuring' I mean that to me it's good that companies/governments can't just put a satellite in orbit without the public knowing at least something about it.
Most likely the stream would be encrypted. They can record the stream and decode, but that would still yield a garbled telemetry / video stream, with a decryption key and method that is unknown and most likely proprietary. Basically 0 chance of decrypting that.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 If it's the US government the algorithm and implementation would be defined by FIPS. The algorithm would be publicly available from a government standard somewhere (of course if you don't have the key that's not much progress). Fun fact: a lot of elliptic curve parameters are quite dodgy and probably backdoored, so the NSA would likely be able to decrypt it.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 IIRC, proprietary encryption schemes are generally considered poor cryptographic practice. Better to use standard schemes that are well-tested and robust. (Easier to implement too)
RF engineer here. SDR tech is a lot of a fun for radio geeks. And Manley is correct, having the raw I-Q file (which I am sure is huge) is the easy part. Decoding the bits into a coherent information stream taking some chops. Kudos to the guys that figured it out.
3:59 The green bits are likely a sync pattern (rather large, probably due to wireless noise concerns). The yellow bits are a sequence number counting up and rolling over to zero (rollover happens at the stark transition from yellow to black). White bits are probably the main data. Turquoise bits I am unsure off. Maybe those are a "packet type" field? My first guess was checksum or CRC, but the solid black sections seems too "patterny" for those things.
@@nicholasmaude6906 eh not exactly any thing that could be under weapons proliferation could end you up in hot water. There was an Australian company that had their technology classified by the usa.
My grandfather was a big-time ham radio nerd, with huge antennas strung between the trees on his acreage. He passed away in 2006, but I know he would have been all over this kind of thing.
SDR is awesome, you used to need some pretty expensive hardware to listen to HF/VHF/UHF radio outside the usual commercial bands, but with SDR hardware and freely available software the whole radio spectrum is open, it's a nerd's paradise.
@3:23 The other gizmo Scott is talking about is a block down converter(BDC). It is essentially a frequency divider. It take a high frequency carrier signal and converts it to a lower frequency that your decoder can handle. An over simplified example: if your satellite signals are transmitted in 30-33GHz range and you BDC divides the frequency by 10, it will convert your signals to 3-3.3 GHz. Some models subtract a fixed frequency instead of divide, but the function is essentially the same. If you have satellite TV, your dish has one of these built in. Except it is called a low noise block down converter(LNB). It has a low noise amplifier (LNA) and a block downconverter (BDC) all in one Unit.
Hey now, sometimes the Texas Tank Watchers need something to occupy themselves during the occasional dull moment in the livestream. Not every day can have exciting things like cryotests!
I don't think they "figured it out"; if you're referencing what I think you are, they were using the Jodrell Bank radio telescope in Britain for their telemetry, and someone in the observatory leaked the photos.
@@Musikur No, the Soviets had their own completely independent communication system, there was no international cooperation at that time. It was straight-up cold war SIGINT.
@@Musikur Two different stories the grammar school used private equipment to detect Soviet craft in orbit and analyzed the orbits. These were school kids with a visionary dedicated teacher.
Hi Scott. I work in the development of SDR radios, and to me it is fascinating that they were able to select the correct waveform to begin with, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that it is a standard one as you mentioned. That is good stuff!
The Eastern European guy who did it this is an "amateur" in name only -- he is very experienced and is famous for decoding signals from Chinese, Iranian and Russian satellites -- all of which, apparently, broadly conform to the same standard.
@@gdwnet but if you have to develop the software and processes to encrypt telemetry for one launch, wouldn’t you just leave it turned on for every launch? I can’t think of any penalty to using encryption, and the less data that gets out the better. Even if you think it’s trivial. Enough of it might pose an issue
3 года назад+24
Seeing those images and plain text GPS telemetry from the Falcon, I thought "Scott Manley". :) Hats off to fellow hams.
Reassuring that such visibility is available to the engineering team, to get a feel for what goes on inside there in the various phases and manoeuvres.
For anyone wanting to get into the RTL-SDR kind of stuff, the "hello world" kind of project is gathering image data from the NOAA satellites. Its a really good kind of "slightly above entry level" introduction to robotics, radio, modulation, antennas and decoding all wrapped into one. It can be real janky and still work. For Mr. Manley: the process of converting a 2.3GHz carrier to the 1.7GHz (or probably lower) that most SDR-dongles use is exactly-ish the same process that satellite TV Low Noise Blocker Downconverter's use to convert the 12ish GHz they actually receive to that 600MHz that actually comes into your house over the cable (or the other way around for internet). In the case of TV, you literally just "mix" (aka multiply) the the 12GHz signal by a 12.6 or 11.4GHz signal, resulting in a 600MHz Intermediate Frequency which is then amplified but still has the 50MHz (or whatever) data modulation in it. Then you can just SDR the 600MHz and recover the original 50MHz channel that was encoded on the 12GHz carrier. I'm guessing you kinda knew all this, but just in case.
Really neat project done by the thought emporium showing how to pull images from satellites using SDR, they also used the same hardware to make a camera that can see wifi
SpaceX will probably not encrypt their data for one reason: Latency. You don't want more latency for the telemetry data output, it could be the difference between the frame that shows a pipe bursting reaching earth or not.
@@RawbLV it's fast but not instant. And a few microseconds of delay can cause you to loose telemetry that could give you important data, e.g. if the rocket fails you really want the latest data possible.
@@minecrafter0505 Right, but when talking about the video feed it doesn't matter since they are translated in a fixed frame rate. Probably 24fps which is 41 milliseconds between frames which is more than enough to encrypt a frame.
Encryption can also be done in a physical manner by making special chips or arranged circuits which encode the data faster with a pre determined key... the only real time sink would be decoding it at the base station. They can easily encode there data for “safety” reasons
The MMDS downconverter is just a mixer, I think. According to the specs, it injects a 2.3GHz signal and the received 2.6GHz frequency into a nonlinear device (like a set of diodes or transistor) to multiply the signals, essentially, and output the difference between the 2 frequencies at around 300MHz. This is called heterodyning! It can be used for down or upconversion, depending on the application.
Yup, generally you build a really nice somewhat wideband receiver, a few hundred MHz, and then you use a down convertor to take the broadcast frequency and mix it down to an intermediate frequency or baseband. It's pretty much reciprocal going up from baseband to the broadcast frequency. You mix two signals together and you'll get the sum and the difference of them as a result. So mix a 300 MHz signal with a 2ghz sinewave and you'll get the 300mhz signal super imposed over 1700 and 2300 MHz. Filter off whichever side you don't want and there ya go.
@@Noubers -- I did some of that in the olden days. Even played a tiny role in designing a hi-tech UHF mobile radio. Fortunately the project was canceled before my tiny part ever got to see actual use.
The nature of "space" transmissions makes encryption troublesome, think data parity and error correction. With unencrypted stream worst case you loose couple of pixels/data packets. With encrypted one you loose the whole data block unless you chop it into smaller chunks which affects in the end performance etc. Almost all civilian satellites are sending unencrypted data back to earth, you can easily decode NOAA, GOES, MetOP, Meteor, MetSat and the Chineese ones. When you think about it it's not like they are sending classified national security data, its bunch of numbers on equipment perfomance.
Well actually (lol) you can use a stream cipher and loose pretty few bits or almost none. Cypher blocks have the issue you talk about but stream cyphers not that much. Stream cyphers are less secure but should be secure enough for these use cases.
It depends on your encryption scheme. If you are using a stream cypher for instance, you won't lose a single extra bit. You might need so resync the stream if you loose too much data but nothing impossible. What you are saying about data loss is worse with compression than encryption, and yet, they are sending h.264 video streams. Also, error correction codes are close to perfect today.
@@gubx42 @João Costa You are both right, in the end, there are military satellites that use encryption and it's in their best interest for it to be solid. What I'm saying for most civilian applications it's not worth the hassle.
I love your videos Scott because you talk about complex tech topics and you don't believe in "lies to children," as you've said in a previous video. Also, I just realized that I've been a fan for over 6 years. O_o
Really surprized to see my radio receiver software (3:43) in a Scott Manley video lol
3 года назад+1
I just installed it yesterday! Works pretty good so far, though having the ability to scroll through the band would be nice. Thanks anyway, certainly much easier to use than SDRAngel.
Wow, I know something that Scott Manley didn't know, what a downconverter is and how it works! Guess I really earned that Extra Class license last year. 73, Scott. DE KB8RVU.
Fascinating stuff, long been impressed by SDR. I'm amazed that all the data wasn't encrypted from the start, to protect Spacex IP, to stop other companies or space agencies borrowing thier formats and protocols.
I expect they'll switch telemetry over to StarLink at some point, which should both improve the views, and restrict the access. I think there's also a market for on-orbit communications services that StarLink could potentially fulfill.
It certainly adds one extra point of failure (loosing the key). However since it happens between compression and forward error correction, it should not be adding other risks.
Really cool. BTW It is an MPEG-2 Transport Stream containing H264 data. The MPEG2-TS is used because the dropped packets are not fatal as the stream initialization data is regularly sent to the demuxer. You could do the same with fragmented MPEG-4 as long as the initialization data provided.
Given how much he likes space/spaceflight, I want to see the look on his face when he manages an EME QSO or even just talks via satellite voice repeater.
There are actually SDRs that will go up to that frequency or higher, but the principle behind downconversion is that you supply a clean, known high frequency source and apply it to a mixer with the received RF to shift it down in frequency. With a clean enough reference and appropriate filters for image rejection, this can get your data stream on a many GHz carrier down into the bandwidth of a regular ADC and directly digitize it. This is the same sort of method that most commercial radios use, so wifi, phone, X band science stuff, etc. all rely on their signal occupying a given bandwidth, but generating it and digitizing it at low frequency and then using mixers to upconvert or downconvert it to the required carrier frequency. You probably have the background in math to understand it just going through an explanation, but my favorite way to demonstrate it is through acoustics. If you're tuning a couple of instruments to the same note they are not sinusoidal pure tones generally, but you can do mixing and downconversion directly in your own home and pick up on it by ear. If you play a tone and play another tone 1Hz higher than it, you will hear the two together as a stable tone with a warble every second, and the warble is actually the downconverted difference frequency. When the two acoustic waves interact, their frequency difference cancels each other out in a way that generates a 1Hz oscillation that's audible in the tone the same way a 1GHz radio carrier can be downconverted to a low speed ADC to read by feeding it another signal that's very close in frequency. Mathematically, you get an "image" of the signal at the positive and negative difference frequency between the two tones, so a 440Hz A and a 441Hz sharper A produce a tone at 1Hz and a tone at 881Hz (a 1Hz warble and a high pitched gnarly note), just as a 2.5GHz incoming radio signal and a 2.499GHz local oscillation produce the incoming signal centered at 1MHz and 4.999GHz. Then to digitize the latter, you just need an ADC that can sample the required bandwidth around your 1MHz new center frequency and appropriate image rejection (a low pass filter) to remove the 4.999GHz higher image and any feedthrough of the original 2.5GHz or 2.499GHz signals that could cause aliasing or other noise.
Encoded WITH encryption. Encoding and encrypting are two different actions. Encoding is formatting the data such that it can be decoded(read). Encrypting is an additional action, done before encoding, making the data unreadable. But probably not, else it would have already been encrypted.
@@TallinuTV Ah, but for that's there is Error Correction. And encryption does not result in more data loss, the stream probably is sent as packets just like the IP/UDP protocol, just with extra error correction codes.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 true but encryption is an action that takes work unless the system has enough over head to accept encryption it will slow down the system this would also depend on how hard of an encryption is used there harder it is the more work it take. also unless they use some really hard encryption someone can just record the data and crack it later even with the hardest of encryption's if someone puts in the time and effort in it will be cracked sooner or later.
Ok... Let's see. Set aside the laptop, you might need it to play games until SpaceX launches again. 20" screen from Goodwill - $10 HDMI 2 dvi converter - $6 Raspberry Pi 400 + power supply + video cable - $100 RTL SDR - $27 So, now you're set on the computer side after spending $143. How much is one of these antennas?
For $300 or less you could probably build a setup that would work. With $1,000 I'd be buying entry-grade professional tools. A really good RTL SDR is $45. (Cheep one is ~$15)
Scott, the Gizmo you refer to at about 3:29 that converts S-band to something the cheap dongles can receive is called a downconverter. Essential, and basic technology. You probably have a dozen around you right now. It's a local oscillator (multiplied crystal or something similar) and a mixer with some filtering.
the LOX blobbing around is so soothing to watch, like a high tech lava lamp inside a mirror room.
ASMR from Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace
@@user-pz1gd3nv4n Now that would be fun video from chubbyemu. "Man drank LOX in space. This is what happened to his everything."
Couple of Quallude's and it'll be just like the 70's.
Indeed, the thermometer frigit spewl is incredibly light for a gh - tetraband
Q
2020: starship launchpad live stream provided by fans
2021: falcon 9 oxygen tank live stream provided by fans
2026: starship Mars landing live stream provided by fans
@@andrey1652 2032: Space-worthy Starship provided by fans
The explosion video was probably quite useful to SpaceX too
@Thanh Tran
- Sir should we use more cameras?
- no
- But data from them will be very usefull
- this is what we have Space nerds for
@@MarlonBitoy 2067: NCC-1701 provided by fans
I think something important to note is that in a failure scenario for anything rocket related, often you might only receive one or two frames of data after things "go wrong" where you see things like the vehicle yawing or engines exploding. Those few frames are *super* important to diagnosing what went wrong, which is why we've been recording the telemetry as far back as we've had rocketry. The challenge then becomes that if you encrypt the stream, you add another layer of potential for that data to become unusable. Take any block cipher, for example (most ciphers in use today are block ciphers). These ciphers could encrypt the stream, sure, BUT at the cost of only being able to encrypt blocks of size X, where X is the size of the cipher, so 256-bits for AES-256. With that in mind, it's entirely possible that if a vehicle fails fast enough there's the possibility that some of that telemetry that _would have been able to be sent otherwise_ no longer gets sent because we were waiting for a few extra bytes to add to the stream. That possibility alone may be enough to give the engineers at SpaceX pause before implementing encryption into the telemetry stream.
Yes! That's why all that redundant data is not compressed. If a rocket explodes on the pad you can get that the last bits of telemetry and figure out the sequence of things getting torn apart. Very satisfying in a way.
They could just use a stream cipher, like chacha20. But I hope they don't and we get to see some interesting extra information
And adding something you don't need adds weight and power consumption. Power is a premium commodity in space, and weight costs. Why spend money on encryption when you don't need to?
I hope you're right, but SN11's telemetry from yesterdays static fire is encrypted, so maybe they don't care about it, or they get the telemetry from a different downlink.
@@sarahjrandomnumbers -- Is your claim a fact?
Scott: "I'm just being a little silly now"
Elon: "Good idea. Putting lasers in LOX tank for lightshow"
Super cool!
@@spacewombat4569 It really wouldn't surprise me. I mean it would, but then it wouldn't ya'know?
I mean, the guy did launch a car into space just for kicks
Lasers on sharks !
@@ryanm7263 Wasn't for kicks. It was a test flight of a new vehicle. It was either the car or a slab of concrete.
As a radio amateur myself it makes me smile that someone who's specialist subject is rocket science is blown away by radio stuff.
Me too! The whole time I'm thinking, 2.2 gig rf, yep, just about where microwaves ovens operate, yawn, downconverters, no biggie, forward error corrections, meh, data streams, boring, ascii decoding, so 80's...then we get WOW! Floating Oxygen Blobs! VERY COOL!
Its also amusing to see how many HAMs are following space stuff. I like to learn something new and exiting every day. Technology and science are always a part of the diet 😁
RUclips is full of trolls, but if you manage to filter them out, it can be a goldmine.
I have been using meteors and the moon for communications on VHF, so even if we do have a ground based hobby, its really nice to know we are using some parts of space to bounce our signals off.
I’m planning on getting my amatuer radio license just studying for it
To us lowly electrical engineers, RF is black magic. What an RF guy says is a 1GHz bandpass filter, the EE says is a dead short.
@@user2C47 True ... made that mistake once ... lol
I'm always in awe at what people are capable of reverse engineering.
The trick is, that people, especially engineers, are lazy. Why reinvent the wheel? If there is an ISO or regional standard that applies, an engineer will probably use that. Same with libraries for the main programming languages. If you look at something that was created to be efficient, it drastically reduces the amount of ways it was possibly created. The shortest path between two points is always a straight line after all.
@@JainZar1 In a sense, Engineers always stand on the shoulders of giants. Laziness does have its perks.
I once reverse engineered a toaster into all its original parts... never worked again but I learned that mom was emotionally attached to kitchen appliances😂
I wish to someone reverse eng a woman so we can finally understand them.
@@JainZar1 First we have punchcard programming. Then we had assembly programming. Then we had a C compiler. A few iterations later we had cloud applications running on VMs inside hypervisors in higly distributed environments created in some metaprogramming language which is popular this week. Of course we engineers are not going to reinvent the wheel. Nobody would use that wheel and it would be very expensive.
There's a lot of security though obscurity in space stuff. For good reason: if you lock your systems down too hard you risk denying legitimate access and it's not like you can go to the front panel on your satellite and hit the reset button.
I played with satellite data for my Masters research. One satellite sent data that said "telemetry" but its owners refused to provide documentation so I reverse-engineered it. Used it to write a nice paper on long-term orbital changes (thus how long the satellite was in daylight each orbit) and how this correlated with the operating temperature of the satellite's systems.
around nasa they still fear that what they're building will end up being the next Saturn 5. An extremely good rocket that could not be made after few years because they forgot how
And you’re a pilot! But seriously, that’s an awesome usage for the telemetry.
It's more a practical thing here if you want the video live over a potentially flaky radio link then encryption increases your risk of lost video, getting the content (or at least some of it) is probably considered more important than security particularly as downlink video is of little use other than maybe SOME commercial sensitivity or curious interest.
I would love a Scott video about your work, seems interesting!
@@dallatorretdu Uhm no, we know exactly how to build a Saturn V, the difference is our industrial base has moved on from 1960s technology. The main challenge in a rocket is the propulsion system and there are numerous companies that could build large kerolox gas generator cycle engines at 1000psi if given the money.
Spacex: suffering from popularity
Wishful Thinking.
anyone looking at SPFR- merger rumor news was released at bottom of market correction so im thinking it could be overlooked. bloomberg rumor to be merging with Velo3d - 3d metal printing company that supplies machines to SpaceX. I think once DA is confirmed we could see 20-50% pop at least... more revenue than desktop metal which reached a peak price of $34. you might want to add to watch list.
@@user9675 ty pump and dump boy number 9
@@0mirix oh no problem, check out FIII also
It is not suffering. Suffering starts if someone decodes the control protocol and lands F9 near Tehran.
radio guys are like wizards. They point a stick at the sky and conjure things out of thin air
Radio wave just a light but you can't see with your eye 😅
This requires serious knowledge. Kudos to the hobbyists that did this
@@DA-cu5xo jealous much, are we?
@@DA-cu5xo if its that easy, why didnt you do it yourself?
I'm Scott Manly, spy safe
First reply (lol)
Wow, does the youtube comment algorithm loved typos? I've posted similar things on dozens of Scott's videos, and the one time I spell his name wrong it gets hundreds of thumbs up... Apologies Mr Manley
Hullo, это Скотт Манли. Spy безопасно
@@Andrew-Kerr шпионь безопасно
@@Andrew-Kerr so is the cold war back
Really incredible work with the decoding part!
For the curious viewer: the "downconverter" mentioned about three and a half minutes in works in a far simpler manner than you might expect: multiplying two waves produces a new signal containing waves formed from the sum and difference of their frequencies (if you've ever heard of "beat frequencies", this is it!) After a special low-noise amplifier, the incoming signal is mixed with a local oscillator of just the right frequency to "translate" the signal into the appropriate range, which is then passed to the SDR.
Hmmm, yes. Very "simple".
And there's one of these in the middle of every satellite TV dish.
Yeah you don't wanna be sampling at at least the Nyquist frequency of the carrier wave if you can avoid it :)
@@arkology_city I wouldn't call it super simple, but it was far simpler than I expected when I first read heard of upconverters. "What black magic could possibly be in one of these boxes?" I wondered. Turns out it's just trig identities.
@@arkology_city It really is, after mixing you only need to filter out the signal you need.. easily done in software with a SDR.
The oxygen tank shots are always so pretty, always happy to see more
Liquid oxygen is such a lovely blue colour.
Yes, it is. I remember the first time I saw it was during one of the Falcon 9 launches where a second or two of footage appeared on the screen and I wondered what I saw with amazed bewilderment. I would welcome more footage.
Don't really comment on RUclips videos that much, but boy are we lucky to have this man.
I love how all that work was done so we can watch "floating" Liquid Oxygen in space
6:34 "Look, this is obviously very cool." While showing a shot of the liquid oxygen.
Underrated comment
Omg I just commented the same thing 👍😊
Would be funny if they'd install an 'Oi! What are you looking at?!" sign in the next oxigen tank :D
Yeah like how they wrote stuff on the raptor engines that people were spying on.
Something like "Ox-Tank" or the SpaceX logo inside the tank would be cool. Like a watermark for the video.
@@kaushik4491 yo you got a link for that? I would love to see it xD
@@thetntsheep4075 ummm, If he referred to the "box" on the raptors, check the @BocaChicaGal on Twitter
Or maybe, "nothing to see here, please move along!"
As a licensed amateur radio operator in the states, I must say Huzzah! to my fellow European hams.
As a wise person once said "Everyone is a nerd for something" and its clear Scott is a sucker for spaceship minutiae and his enthusiasm is infectious.
I never had the patience for that level of geekiness. It's really good that somebody does.
ok boomer?
Same... Digital RF wizardry like that will always be way over my head 😁
Right? I just use my rtl-sdr to listen in on air traffic and ham radio operators talking about conspiracy theories. :-P
I know right! My level of patience maxes out at making 27 M1-D engines from ⅜in dowels for Falcon Heavy model rockets...!
@@andie_pants :o)
Sending things unencrypted "because nobody is listening/viewing anyway" is quite common, or at least it was.
I remember many years ago it was possible to watch links from US drones back to their base on normal geostationary satellites in Ku-band.
You would see the video footage of them flying over enemy territory. I have been viewing it for a couple of afternoons, I think it was at 37.5W.
That is, until someone boasted about this on the BBC and they showed it on a news show. That was the end of that fun, it became encrypted.
I expect a similar change on this transmission.
ever see it blow up a jihadi
I remember seeing pals tweeting screenshots from a livestream of one of those receivers. Never bothered to check if it was actually real, had kind of thought it was a joke.
Damn boasting on national TV, tho!
@@lolbots they have a good footage of blown up weddings, too
I heard that the encryption came when someone not far from Iraq hijacked the control channel, eh.
Part of the change was when Iran spoofed location and control data and recovered a UAV sometime before 2010. Now all the GPS is encrypted too, as well as up/down links.
Amateur radio operators have been receiving spacecraft telemetry for decades.
They have but this was something more profound, as in a digital signal modulated onto a very high frequency. That is a bit harder to decode than an analogue signal, even though standards were used in constructing the digital signal (SpaceX). Had the coding standard been proprietary and kept secret, there would have been close to 0 chance they would be able to decode the signal.
Like this is what we do. From. Cubesats to weather satellites. Kd2nfc
Since the beep-beep-beep of Sputnik.
I remember how a local computer magazine in 1990 had instructions on how to receive and decode weather satellite pictures with a Commodore 64 here in Finland. All you really needed was a cheap radio receiver, record the transmission to tape and read it with a C64 and a cheap AD converter.
I’m surprised that security is not more of a concern. Sure, you can’t do evil things with the downlink (except maybe learn some trade or state secrets), but what about sending commands to spacecraft? Are they unencrypted as well? Even if it’s encrypted, since this is the space industry they probably use 30 year old algorithms which could be cracked.
I can't be the only one who's reaction was: "oh look at those slosh baffles"
Yes you are not alone cos this IS a Scott Manley show
Second that! Slosh baffles are definitely a Thing!
We all knew they would be there just the design was in question.
Surely you can't possibly think that you really are the only one thinking something like this to a Scott Manley video, can you? Surely you're just phrasing it like this for attention because you're an insecure little drama queen, aren't you? Also: whose* reaction
@@Anvilshock Surely you can't possibly think that you really are not a wanker mate
*Smiles and nods politely as every word goes over my head*
The reason you don’t want a whole bunch of low values is that it’s hard to keep your clock synched. Basically “was that 77 low values or 78 low values?” If you get that number wrong, your bit stream ends up off by one and screws up your decode.
I’d like to know the clock speeds they’re running during the flights and try and get the data too. Don’t know if my location would benefit and actually obtain on a fly-by before the loads are deployed. There would probably be some flights over my area eventually. Lol
Same thing in the Modem chips. You lose lock if there isn't a transition for a while. That encoded looked the same as the one we used back in the 80's
@@petehaidinyak9084 - I remember being in Kwajalein Atoll for our missile test capturing telemetry back in the early 80’s, but most of the time we used just the radar returns to gather the most accurate data because we weren’t always able to keep locks on the telemetry. It wasn’t always a perfect systems operations in the hot humid weather. Kwajalein where America’s day begins.
More than just timing, data communication carriers in general use energy dispersal to ensure that there aren't long runs of ones and zeros and also for energy dispersal to make sure that the transmitted waveform doesn't suddenly go to essentially CW or otherwise cause high spectral density emissions in narrow chunks of the carrier band. This requirement relates to sharing frequency spectrum with other users and helps reduce interference between services and systems.
Are we talking about Alternate Mark Inversion, which I learned about in the Eighties? Also useful to prevent DC bias in copper circuits.
Finally some quality Liquid Oxygen tank footage
SpaceX: *launching satellites into space*
Scott Manley: "Do a barrel roll!"
One of the people who did this, FelixTRG, is in the same fan SpaceX Discord server as me and he's been talking about how they accomplished this and it's super fascinating. super cool stuff.
Very impressive. GM4 HIG (no longer active). Brings me back to my Radio Amateur Microwave TV days when I used to send pictures over the North Sea from Southern Aberdeen with just 25 watts max ERP.
Well, I had just enough HF tech at university to know that I am not enough of a nerd for it.
But this channel is awesome for the average space nerd, thx a lot Scott !
This seems like the most forward thinking reverse engineering I’ve seen.
I’ve seen genius decapping integrated circuit and reverse engineering them but yeah, reverse engineering data stream is impressive.
Check “Applied Science” and “CuriousMarc” just for a glimpse of decapping IC chips
You should watch some DEFCON videos
honestly, decoding data streams is significantly less impressive than tracing out and reveres engineering an IC
The very kinds of people that are attracted to your channel are the ones who are capable of building the stuff you can't. That is the real question.
That's not a question?
Blue origin guys never have to worry about this. Their rocket never goes out of sight, worst case you might need sunglasses 😂
oof
Gonna need a ice bath for that burn.
BURN!!😂😂
But seriously, when is the New Glenn gonna fly? I'm concerned about SpaceX getting a total monopoly.
3:26 Scott: The gizmo basicly works like this: It is a bandwidth problem. Simplified version is that stuff sent on lower frequencies will always have a lower theoretical transfer rate. But this gizmo can help by capturing data in higher bandwidths, and smear the same data out across more frequencies in a lower part of the spectrum while retaining the same amount of information. Depending on how far you shift the frequencies, you might have to filter to only a very narrow band of high frequency before shifting it down and smearing it out across a relatively large band in lower frequencies in order to retain the same amount of information. This is about as far as I understand it, but I hope it gives a clue at least.
9 flights/recoveries with the same rocket booster... that is just phenomenal 👏
And to think SpaceX has a fleet of boosters much like an airline has a fleet of 747s. Mind boggled.
@@brianroys1868 Afaik they are struggling with the current launch cadence. One launch every 9 days on average this year. Pretty amazing.
@@brianroys1868 makes me think that they'll be able to figure out Raptor/Heavy Booster production in due course and be able to keep up with their own demand
@@brianroys1868 Well, its a pretty small active fleet of 7 Falcon 9 and 1 Falcon Heavy and theyre all either right back from a flight or planned for the next one. Their insane cadence might make it feel like there must be a lot of boosters but nope, they just got this fast with recovering them :D
Scott: Makes super cool video.
My ADHD: *watches space photos cycling in the pc background*
8:57 ....the most genuine and wholesome "I Love it" you'll probably ever hear lol
As an engineer I am very interested by the oxygen tank video.. well done to these guys.. ingenuity is one of the few things that give me hope for our species..
Scott you are the one person I'll come to to hear about this type of stuff. Sure, you're not an RF expert but you seem to know enough about a whole lot of things that the main point and passion is communicated well. Cheers
I've been playing with images NOAA and METEOR sats for a while, If you've never done it, it's really cool to see a live image beamed from space to your own computer, but this is really impressive!
Something really cool about watching those older weather satellites. All they are doing is scanning what they see below them and streaming it as a continuous strip. Just scanlines with 2 images and sync columns.
@@davidmcgill1000 Elegant isn't it?
Kind of appeals in it's simplicity, and the fact that some of them still work!
would be nice to intercept transmissions from earth observation cubesats from like Planet Labs
@@JukentheBox I think you CAN get stuff from the planetlabs swarms, but I think it's just telemetry, at least it rigns a bell. there's loads of them that have telemetry signals in the clear. my microwave setup is pretty primitive at the mo so I've not done much to see what's up there lately.
It's somewhat reassuring to know that 'regular people' can do this and it's not completely isolated from public knowledge
Please let me know these regular people you speak of
@@pedromiranda5448 as in people who are not involved with the company. By 'reassuring' I mean that to me it's good that companies/governments can't just put a satellite in orbit without the public knowing at least something about it.
We put up a 16 foot satellite dish in 1972 and listened to the astronauts vhf radios on the moon. Apollo 17
I'd love to see them do this with a launch carrying a classified payload.
Most likely the stream would be encrypted. They can record the stream and decode, but that would still yield a garbled telemetry / video stream, with a decryption key and method that is unknown and most likely proprietary. Basically 0 chance of decrypting that.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 If it's the US government the algorithm and implementation would be defined by FIPS. The algorithm would be publicly available from a government standard somewhere (of course if you don't have the key that's not much progress). Fun fact: a lot of elliptic curve parameters are quite dodgy and probably backdoored, so the NSA would likely be able to decrypt it.
They'd be found dead after "committing suicide".
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 IIRC, proprietary encryption schemes are generally considered poor cryptographic practice. Better to use standard schemes that are well-tested and robust. (Easier to implement too)
@@marc-andreservant201 Nice to know. Thanks. My knowledge is not very deep on this subject.
RF engineer here. SDR tech is a lot of a fun for radio geeks. And Manley is correct, having the raw I-Q file (which I am sure is huge) is the easy part. Decoding the bits into a coherent information stream taking some chops. Kudos to the guys that figured it out.
3:59 The green bits are likely a sync pattern (rather large, probably due to wireless noise concerns). The yellow bits are a sequence number counting up and rolling over to zero (rollover happens at the stark transition from yellow to black). White bits are probably the main data. Turquoise bits I am unsure off. Maybe those are a "packet type" field? My first guess was checksum or CRC, but the solid black sections seems too "patterny" for those things.
classified launches are gonna be more interesting
Wouldn't that get you prison time?
@@brandonfleming7118 No, it won't. Because it's encrypted.
@@brandonfleming7118 Only if you're a US citizen or permanent resident and only if you're in the US.
@@nicholasmaude6906 eh not exactly any thing that could be under weapons proliferation could end you up in hot water. There was an Australian company that had their technology classified by the usa.
@@nicholasmaude6906 or if your country has an extradition treaty with the USA
My grandfather was a big-time ham radio nerd, with huge antennas strung between the trees on his acreage. He passed away in 2006, but I know he would have been all over this kind of thing.
SDR is awesome, you used to need some pretty expensive hardware to listen to HF/VHF/UHF radio outside the usual commercial bands, but with SDR hardware and freely available software the whole radio spectrum is open, it's a nerd's paradise.
I didn't. It was a simple modification to the board on most transceivers
@3:23 The other gizmo Scott is talking about is a block down converter(BDC). It is essentially a frequency divider. It take a high frequency carrier signal and converts it to a lower frequency that your decoder can handle. An over simplified example: if your satellite signals are transmitted in 30-33GHz range and you BDC divides the frequency by 10, it will convert your signals to 3-3.3 GHz. Some models subtract a fixed frequency instead of divide, but the function is essentially the same.
If you have satellite TV, your dish has one of these built in. Except it is called a low noise block down converter(LNB). It has a low noise amplifier (LNA) and a block downconverter (BDC) all in one Unit.
This is just as cool as decrypting the signal of weather sattelites and getting IR images from geosynchronous orbit. Awesome work!
Now they need a picture of a QR-code for the "Never gonna give you up" RUclips video inside the tank.
Absolutely!
Or even just it make one of the camera feeds that you would only see if you intercepted the data...
Rick, is that you?
Don’t tempt the engineers over there
IN CASE ANYBODY MISSED IT - ""Never Gonna Give You Up" is known as the world famous 'Rick Roll' song."
Awww yisss. A new Scott Manley video has dropped 🔥
2020: Texas tank watchers
2021: Europe LOX tank watchers
Hey now, sometimes the Texas Tank Watchers need something to occupy themselves during the occasional dull moment in the livestream. Not every day can have exciting things like cryotests!
This brings to mind the Kettering group that figured out the telemetry from an early Luna spacecraft and beat the Soviets into print.
I don't think they "figured it out"; if you're referencing what I think you are, they were using the Jodrell Bank radio telescope in Britain for their telemetry, and someone in the observatory leaked the photos.
@@Musikur No, the Soviets had their own completely independent communication system, there was no international cooperation at that time. It was straight-up cold war SIGINT.
@@Musikur Two different stories the grammar school used private equipment to detect Soviet craft in orbit and analyzed the orbits.
These were school kids with a visionary dedicated teacher.
A fantastic video from Scott. Those guys who found a way to find this info are brilliant, well done.
Hi Scott. I work in the development of SDR radios, and to me it is fascinating that they were able to select the correct waveform to begin with, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that it is a standard one as you mentioned. That is good stuff!
The Eastern European guy who did it this is an "amateur" in name only -- he is very experienced and is famous for decoding signals from Chinese, Iranian and Russian satellites -- all of which, apparently, broadly conform to the same standard.
if they set up in the ocean could they get fairing separation of a classified satellite deployment.
Unlikely. Those will be encrypted.
@@gdwnet Unless they are not - do not underestimate government inefficiency :)
@@foxtrotunit1269 But then it's probably illegal, governments are very eager to outlaw things
more likely they just remove or turn off the cameras that would show the classified stuff
@@gdwnet but if you have to develop the software and processes to encrypt telemetry for one launch, wouldn’t you just leave it turned on for every launch? I can’t think of any penalty to using encryption, and the less data that gets out the better. Even if you think it’s trivial. Enough of it might pose an issue
Seeing those images and plain text GPS telemetry from the Falcon, I thought "Scott Manley". :) Hats off to fellow hams.
somehow dissepointed that the funny people at spaceX didn't already put a message in the lox tank.. 'if you can read this...'
The problem is that most things like to confllagrate in pure oxygen, so they can't just write it on some gaff tape lol
"If you can read this, we want to hire you"
@@ke6gwf Well, I know that Teflon and gold don't like to do that. There's a start.
or that the cake is a lie
Reassuring that such visibility is available to the engineering team, to get a feel for what goes on inside there in the various phases and manoeuvres.
For anyone wanting to get into the RTL-SDR kind of stuff, the "hello world" kind of project is gathering image data from the NOAA satellites. Its a really good kind of "slightly above entry level" introduction to robotics, radio, modulation, antennas and decoding all wrapped into one. It can be real janky and still work.
For Mr. Manley: the process of converting a 2.3GHz carrier to the 1.7GHz (or probably lower) that most SDR-dongles use is exactly-ish the same process that satellite TV Low Noise Blocker Downconverter's use to convert the 12ish GHz they actually receive to that 600MHz that actually comes into your house over the cable (or the other way around for internet).
In the case of TV, you literally just "mix" (aka multiply) the the 12GHz signal by a 12.6 or 11.4GHz signal, resulting in a 600MHz Intermediate Frequency which is then amplified but still has the 50MHz (or whatever) data modulation in it. Then you can just SDR the 600MHz and recover the original 50MHz channel that was encoded on the 12GHz carrier.
I'm guessing you kinda knew all this, but just in case.
Really neat project done by the thought emporium showing how to pull images from satellites using SDR, they also used the same hardware to make a camera that can see wifi
SpaceX will probably not encrypt their data for one reason: Latency. You don't want more latency for the telemetry data output, it could be the difference between the frame that shows a pipe bursting reaching earth or not.
Encryption is fast, what latency are you talking about?
@@RawbLV it's fast but not instant. And a few microseconds of delay can cause you to loose telemetry that could give you important data, e.g. if the rocket fails you really want the latest data possible.
@@minecrafter0505 Right, but when talking about the video feed it doesn't matter since they are translated in a fixed frame rate. Probably 24fps which is 41 milliseconds between frames which is more than enough to encrypt a frame.
Encryption can also be done in a physical manner by making special chips or arranged circuits which encode the data faster with a pre determined key... the only real time sink would be decoding it at the base station. They can easily encode there data for “safety” reasons
The spirit of Bletchley Park lives on into the 21st century !
I LOVE the idea of the in tank laser show... structured laser light would actually ve amazing to analyze exactly what blobs are forming and when...
Sometimes I am amazed how much free time some people have :D Keep up the good work anyway! This is amazing!
It’s funny because sometimes they accidentally show the oxygen tank cameras during the live feed, but just for a couple of seconds.
I didn't know that was accidental. I thought they always showed it when the the engines were cut off
The MMDS downconverter is just a mixer, I think. According to the specs, it injects a 2.3GHz signal and the received 2.6GHz frequency into a nonlinear device (like a set of diodes or transistor) to multiply the signals, essentially, and output the difference between the 2 frequencies at around 300MHz.
This is called heterodyning! It can be used for down or upconversion, depending on the application.
"heterodyning, diodes, transistors" So quaint!
Yup, generally you build a really nice somewhat wideband receiver, a few hundred MHz, and then you use a down convertor to take the broadcast frequency and mix it down to an intermediate frequency or baseband.
It's pretty much reciprocal going up from baseband to the broadcast frequency.
You mix two signals together and you'll get the sum and the difference of them as a result. So mix a 300 MHz signal with a 2ghz sinewave and you'll get the 300mhz signal super imposed over 1700 and 2300 MHz. Filter off whichever side you don't want and there ya go.
@@Noubers -- I did some of that in the olden days. Even played a tiny role in designing a hi-tech UHF mobile radio. Fortunately the project was canceled before my tiny part ever got to see actual use.
The nature of "space" transmissions makes encryption troublesome, think data parity and error correction. With unencrypted stream worst case you loose couple of pixels/data packets. With encrypted one you loose the whole data block unless you chop it into smaller chunks which affects in the end performance etc. Almost all civilian satellites are sending unencrypted data back to earth, you can easily decode NOAA, GOES, MetOP, Meteor, MetSat and the Chineese ones. When you think about it it's not like they are sending classified national security data, its bunch of numbers on equipment perfomance.
Well actually (lol) you can use a stream cipher and loose pretty few bits or almost none.
Cypher blocks have the issue you talk about but stream cyphers not that much.
Stream cyphers are less secure but should be secure enough for these use cases.
It depends on your encryption scheme. If you are using a stream cypher for instance, you won't lose a single extra bit. You might need so resync the stream if you loose too much data but nothing impossible. What you are saying about data loss is worse with compression than encryption, and yet, they are sending h.264 video streams. Also, error correction codes are close to perfect today.
@@gubx42 2 people that know about stream ciphers but can't spell lose lol
@@gubx42 @João Costa You are both right, in the end, there are military satellites that use encryption and it's in their best interest for it to be solid. What I'm saying for most civilian applications it's not worth the hassle.
I can always count in Scott for great content. He never fails.
I love your videos Scott because you talk about complex tech topics and you don't believe in "lies to children," as you've said in a previous video. Also, I just realized that I've been a fan for over 6 years. O_o
Scott wants to use a rocket's oxygen tank as the world's most expensive lava lamp 😄👍
i'm expecting to see some sci-fi trivia wise-crack written on the inside of the tank
DOGE photo?
The liquid oxygen blobbing around is just hypnotic. That should be SpaceX pause video between engine events and payload deploy.
Aye it's totally beautiful. Liquid ozone is quite awesome looking too.
Insanely cool. Not just the LOX tank view, the RF hacking etc is awesome on its own. Put together, it's mind blowing.
Awesome scott. Way to go keeping it real. We can always count on u
Amateur radio has been the basepoint of many technology advances. Ham operators always impress me.
Really surprized to see my radio receiver software (3:43) in a Scott Manley video lol
I just installed it yesterday! Works pretty good so far, though having the ability to scroll through the band would be nice. Thanks anyway, certainly much easier to use than SDRAngel.
@ Shouldn't be too hard to add ;)
Btw, make sure you always run the latest commit and not the releases, I push fixes very often.
Wow, I know something that Scott Manley didn't know, what a downconverter is and how it works! Guess I really earned that Extra Class license last year. 73, Scott. DE KB8RVU.
I am no expert in radio, but I seem to remember that one can demodulate the signal to get rid of the high frequency carrier. Am I correct in this.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 Look up the superheterodyne principle.
Fascinating stuff, long been impressed by SDR. I'm amazed that all the data wasn't encrypted from the start, to protect Spacex IP, to stop other companies or space agencies borrowing thier formats and protocols.
Decoding would take skills and knowledge on several fronts and disciplines. Anyone passing it off as easy has never and will never do it. Fab vid
I've got a couple of SDR's, you can find some pretty interesting stuff with them.
I expect they'll switch telemetry over to StarLink at some point, which should both improve the views, and restrict the access. I think there's also a market for on-orbit communications services that StarLink could potentially fulfill.
It'll depend on starlink's antenna design as to whether they can talk to a rocket in an arbitrary orbit.
@@benash2954 I'm betting on the freeking lasers for on-orbit links
When SpaceX first started launching the Falcon 9 they did occasionally show the vide in the O2 or fuel tank but stopped for whatever reason.
OK9UWU is the best callsign I've seen so far
Oh yess, I really like the view inside the tank. That is so satisfying to watch!
Encryption decreases reliability of reception, it's a trade off on what's more important, getting the data or making it secure.
It certainly adds one extra point of failure (loosing the key). However since it happens between compression and forward error correction, it should not be adding other risks.
FCC also regulates what non-federal entities can employ encryption on RF transmissions
@@johndododoe1411 You wouldn't want a _loose_ key anyway …
“up in the S-band” caught me by surprize
They used s band during the moon landings.
inb4 they XOR all of the data with a bunch of 420's at elons request
420 is too big to fit in a byte, 69 however is not
@@lucky-segfault you know - as a cs student writing VDHL code for projects I should have considered that
@@lucky-segfault Back in the day, not all bytes were 8 bits. The obvious solution is to go with 9 bit bytes :D
@@MarkRose1337 ouch! It hurt reading that. The smiley didn't really make it any better.
Really cool. BTW It is an MPEG-2 Transport Stream containing H264 data. The MPEG2-TS is used because the dropped packets are not fatal as the stream initialization data is regularly sent to the demuxer. You could do the same with fragmented MPEG-4 as long as the initialization data provided.
I bet the SpaceX engineers are super impressed. These guys are true enthusiasts
I didn't understood a 'bit' but still watched whole video.. I don't know why.. Lol
What's the name of your outro? Its so catchy
Computer Music All-stars - May the Chords Be with You
Get your ham ticket, Scott. Honestly it's weird you don't have one.
Concur.
Given how much he likes space/spaceflight, I want to see the look on his face when he manages an EME QSO or even just talks via satellite voice repeater.
@@DrDeFord or he makes contact with ISS during one of their HAM events...
There are actually SDRs that will go up to that frequency or higher, but the principle behind downconversion is that you supply a clean, known high frequency source and apply it to a mixer with the received RF to shift it down in frequency. With a clean enough reference and appropriate filters for image rejection, this can get your data stream on a many GHz carrier down into the bandwidth of a regular ADC and directly digitize it. This is the same sort of method that most commercial radios use, so wifi, phone, X band science stuff, etc. all rely on their signal occupying a given bandwidth, but generating it and digitizing it at low frequency and then using mixers to upconvert or downconvert it to the required carrier frequency.
You probably have the background in math to understand it just going through an explanation, but my favorite way to demonstrate it is through acoustics. If you're tuning a couple of instruments to the same note they are not sinusoidal pure tones generally, but you can do mixing and downconversion directly in your own home and pick up on it by ear. If you play a tone and play another tone 1Hz higher than it, you will hear the two together as a stable tone with a warble every second, and the warble is actually the downconverted difference frequency. When the two acoustic waves interact, their frequency difference cancels each other out in a way that generates a 1Hz oscillation that's audible in the tone the same way a 1GHz radio carrier can be downconverted to a low speed ADC to read by feeding it another signal that's very close in frequency. Mathematically, you get an "image" of the signal at the positive and negative difference frequency between the two tones, so a 440Hz A and a 441Hz sharper A produce a tone at 1Hz and a tone at 881Hz (a 1Hz warble and a high pitched gnarly note), just as a 2.5GHz incoming radio signal and a 2.499GHz local oscillation produce the incoming signal centered at 1MHz and 4.999GHz. Then to digitize the latter, you just need an ADC that can sample the required bandwidth around your 1MHz new center frequency and appropriate image rejection (a low pass filter) to remove the 4.999GHz higher image and any feedthrough of the original 2.5GHz or 2.499GHz signals that could cause aliasing or other noise.
This is an example of how space programs stimulate peoples curiosity. Sometimes in ways that you don't expect.
Greetings from the Czech republic :)
Does this mean the next generation telemetry will be encoded by encryption next
Encoded WITH encryption. Encoding and encrypting are two different actions. Encoding is formatting the data such that it can be decoded(read). Encrypting is an additional action, done before encoding, making the data unreadable. But probably not, else it would have already been encrypted.
Unlikely because encryption would result in more data loss when interference or transmission errors occur.
@@TallinuTV Ah, but for that's there is Error Correction. And encryption does not result in more data loss, the stream probably is sent as packets just like the IP/UDP protocol, just with extra error correction codes.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 true but encryption is an action that takes work unless the system has enough over head to accept encryption it will slow down the system this would also depend on how hard of an encryption is used there harder it is the more work it take. also unless they use some really hard encryption someone can just record the data and crack it later even with the hardest of encryption's if someone puts in the time and effort in it will be cracked sooner or later.
@@phalanx3803 Anything can be hacked, eventually. But if CPU speed is an issue encryption/decryption can be done in hardware. It often is.
And a new (r/outside) speedrun category was born:
1000$, laptop, empty garage with electricity to Falcon LOX tank live feed
Ok... Let's see. Set aside the laptop, you might need it to play games until SpaceX launches again.
20" screen from Goodwill - $10
HDMI 2 dvi converter - $6
Raspberry Pi 400 + power supply + video cable - $100
RTL SDR - $27
So, now you're set on the computer side after spending $143. How much is one of these antennas?
For $300 or less you could probably build a setup that would work. With $1,000 I'd be buying entry-grade professional tools. A really good RTL SDR is $45. (Cheep one is ~$15)
Scott, the Gizmo you refer to at about 3:29 that converts S-band to something the cheap dongles can receive is called a downconverter. Essential, and basic technology. You probably have a dozen around you right now. It's a local oscillator (multiplied crystal or something similar) and a mixer with some filtering.
Who ever is doing these downloads needs to be accepted as great PR.