Receive real-time antenna telemetry

Azure Orbital Ground station emits antenna telemetry events that can be used to analyze ground station operation during a contact. You can configure your contact profile to send telemetry events to Azure Event Hubs..

In this guide, you'll learn how to:

Configure Event Hubs

1. In your subscription, go to resource providers in settings. Search for Microsoft.Orbital and register it as a provider.
2. Create an Azure Event Hubs namespace and an event hub in your subscription.

3. From the left menu, select Access control (IAM). Under 'Grant access to this resource,' select Add role assignment.

4. Under the Role tab, search for and select Azure Event Hubs Data Sender. Click Next.
5. Under the Members tab, assign access to User, group, or service principal.
6. Click + Select members.
7. Search for Azure Orbital Resource Provider and click Select.
8. Click Review + assign. This action grants Azure Orbital Ground Station the rights to send telemetry into your event hub.
9. To confirm the newly added role assignment, go back to the Access Control (IAM) page and select View access to this resource. Azure Orbital Resource Provider should be under Azure Event Hubs Data Sender.

Enable Event Hubs telemetry for a contact profile

Configure a contact profile as follows:

1. Choose a namespace using the Event Hubs Namespace dropdown.
2. Choose an instance using the Event Hubs Instance dropdown that appears after namespace selection.

You can update the settings of an existing contact profile by

Verify antenna telemetry data from a contact

Schedule contacts using the contact profile that you previously configured for Event Hubs telemetry. Once a contact begins, you should begin seeing data in your Event Hubs soon after.

You can verify both the presence and content of incoming telemetry data multiple ways.

Event Hubs namespace dashboard

To verify that events are being received in your Event Hubs, you can check the graphs present on the overview page of your Event Hubs namespace within your resource group. This view shows data across all Event Hubs instances within a namespace. You can navigate to the overview page of a specific Event Hub instance in your resource group to see the graphs for that instance.

Deliver antenna telemetry data to a storage account

You can enable the Event Hubs Capture feature to automatically deliver the telemetry data to an Azure Blob storage account of your choosing. Follow the instructions to enable Capture and capture data to Azure storage. Once enabled, you can check your container and view/download the data.

Understand telemetry points

Current telemetry schema version: 4.1

The ground station provides telemetry using Avro as a schema. The schema is below. Note, Microsoft antennas emit Telemetry once the first data point is received. Telemetry is reported using a "last known value" approach, meaning that we will always send the most recent value we have for a metric. Due to this behavior, you may see a NULL value in the first second of a contact until that metric is first produced.

{
  "namespace": "EventSchema",
  "name": "TelemetryEventSchema",
  "type": "record",
  "fields": [
    {
      "name": "version",
      "type": [ "null", "string" ]
    },
    {
      "name": "contactId",
      "type": [ "null", "string" ]
    },
    {
      "name": "contactPlatformIdentifier",
      "type": [ "null", "string" ]
    },
    {
      "name": "groundStationName",
      "type": [ "null", "string" ]
    },
    {
      "name": "antennaType",
      "type": {
        "name": "antennaTypeEnum",
        "type": "enum",
        "symbols": [
          "Microsoft",
          "KSAT"
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "name": "antennaId",
      "type": [ "null", "string" ]
    },
    {
      "name": "spacecraftName",
      "type": [ "null", "string" ]
    },
    {
      "name": "gpsTime",
      "type": [ "null", "double" ]
    },
    {
      "name": "utcTime",
      "type": "string"
    },
    {
      "name": "azimuthDecimalDegrees",
      "type": [ "null", "double" ]
    },
    {
      "name": "elevationDecimalDegrees",
      "type": [ "null", "double" ]
    },
    {
      "name": "contactTleLine1",
      "type": [ "null", "string" ]
    },
    {
      "name": "contactTleLine2",
      "type": [ "null", "string" ]
    },
    {
      "name": "links",
      "type": [
        "null",
        {
          "type": "array",
          "items": {
            "name": "antennaLink",
            "type": "record",
            "fields": [
              {
                "name": "name",
                "type": [ "null", "string" ]
              },
              {
                "name": "direction",
                "type": {
                  "name": "directionEnum",
                  "type": "enum",
                  "symbols": [
                    "Uplink",
                    "Downlink"
                  ]
                }
              },
              {
                "name": "polarization",
                "type": {
                  "name": "polarizationEnum",
                  "type": "enum",
                  "symbols": [
                    "RHCP",
                    "LHCP",
                    "linearVertical",
                    "linearHorizontal"
                  ]
                }
              },
              {
                "name": "uplinkEnabled",
                "type": [ "null", "boolean" ]
              },
              {
                "name": "channels",
                "type": [
                  "null",
                  {
                    "type": "array",
                    "items": {
                      "name": "antennaLinkChannel",
                      "type": "record",
                      "fields": [
                        {
                          "name": "name",
                          "type": [ "null", "string" ]
                        },
                        {
                          "name": "modemName",
                          "type": [ "null", "string" ]
                        },
                        {
                          "name": "digitizerName",
                          "type": [ "null", "string" ]
                        },
                        {
                          "name": "endpointName",
                          "type": "string"
                        },
                        {
                          "name": "inputEbN0InDb",
                          "type": [ "null", "double" ]
                        },
                        {
                          "name": "inputEsN0InDb",
                          "type": [ "null", "double" ]
                        },
                        {
                          "name": "inputRfPowerDbm",
                          "type": [ "null", "double" ]
                        },
                        {
                          "name": "outputRfPowerDbm",
                          "type": [ "null", "double" ]
                        },
                        {
                          "name": "packetRate",
                          "type": [ "null", "double" ]
                        },
                        {
                          "name": "gapCount",
                          "type": [ "null", "double" ]
                        },
                        {
                          "name": "modemLockStatus",
                          "type": [
                            "null",
                            {
                              "name": "modemLockStatusEnum",
                              "type": "enum",
                              "symbols": [
                                "Unlocked",
                                "Locked"
                              ]
                            }
                          ]
                        },
                        {
                          "name": "commandsSent",
                          "type": [ "null", "double" ]
                        }
                      ]
                    }
                  }
                ]
              }
            ]
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

The following table provides the source device/point, possible values, and definition of each telemetry point.

Event consumers

You can write simple consumer apps to receive events from your Event Hubs using event consumers. Refer to the following documentation to learn how to send and receive events Event Hubs in various languages:

• Python
• .NET
• Java
• JavaScript

Changelog

2024-04-17 - Updated schema to include possible NULL for TLEs, and added EsN0 for QRX, and added blurb about how Microsoft antennas may have a NULL for a field during the first second of a contact. 2023-10-03 - Introduce version 4.0. Updated schema to include uplink packet metrics and names of infrastructure in use (ground station, antenna, spacecraft, modem, digitizer, link, channel)
2023-06-05 - Updated schema to show metrics under channels instead of links.

Next steps

• Event Hubs using Python Getting Started
• Azure Event Hubs client library for Python code samples