The ESA satellite OPS-SAT PRETTY successfully executed the game Doom following a voice command transmitted from Earth. The experiment, titled PRETTY DOOMed, was conducted by the LA4O radio club of the Norwegian Radio Relay League. The team utilized an Icom IC-9700 radio and a Wimo helix antenna to transmit signals at 1296 MHz with 80 W of power.
Onboard processing relied on a 27 MB quantized speech-recognition model designed to fit the satellite's hardware constraints. The system used software-defined radio to isolate and demodulate the voice signal from orbital noise. The successful execution occurred on the seventh attempt after engineers implemented a fix to address signal frequency discrepancies.
The project required 59 days of preparation and a total budget of 7200 NOK, which is approximately 770 USD. The team performed offline analysis to adjust the signal processing, specifically shifting the baseband and applying low-pass filtering. This experiment demonstrated the capability to update satellite software to improve signal reception and command recognition.
