GK-2A – A New Data File

Whilst making some changes to some of the GK-2A code I noticed a new directory and file that I’d never seen before.

Looking back, I noticed a few other similar downloaded files.

So the question was what was it. The .bin extension immediately made me think it may be a binary file of some sort, which is the normal thing you see with a .bin file extension.

So being cautious, I opened it up in Notepad++, which is a great text editor.

At this point I asked for help in a Discord chat, but nobody there had seen it either. So the next step was Google, but even Google didn’t know much. For the two hits it had, both of these where just downloads of the same files from GK-2A (

One good suggestion was that it could need a hex editor and of course Notepad++ has the ability to convert to a hex view.

So this looked potentially promising, but what was it? We rapidly decided that the odds of it being satellite firmware were virtually nil. But a good suggestion was that the original view might be Korean. However since none of us could read Korean, the obvious was to try it with Google Translate.

So all the file was in the end was some Korean text with weather warnings, which wasn’t quite as exciting as finding out that it was some satellite firmware. But still it was an exciting 10 minutes as we collectively figured out what the file was all about, which I think was pretty impressive (thanks Dark_hunter and nullpainter).

And by the time you’ve read this, you’ll know as much as Google does about this new file format.

You can view the latest file, in Korean, on the GK-2A latest graphics page, at the bottom of the page. And if you want to read it., if you don’t know Korean, just use Google Translate.