Hi,
I am a beginner and am performing satellite observations but not successful yet.
I am using rpi 3, RTL-SDR dongle and do not have rotator setup but a dipole antenna.
Say, I schedule an observation succesfully, but when the time of observation arrives -
Do I need my rpi to be actively connected to internet for the observation to be triggered and continued for that particular observation to happen?
Is it fine if I connect the rpi once to the internet before the actual time of observation so that time sync happens and then disconnect the rpi from wifi, so that satnogs client triggers observation at right time and saves data offline for later use/processing
For the post processing / after observation, I believe I need to connect my rpi to internet (for satnogs-db / satnogs network…) for uploading the data observed and post processing - am I right? Pls clarify this part of the flow a bit in detail.
When Client is online, it asks Network for scheduled jobs/observations. All the received jobs are saved locally, so no internet is needed during the observation.
It is fine, if you have kept the default value for API requests, Client will ask Network every 1min, so letting the station online for a couple of minutes should be fine.
Every 2min the Client tries to upload any observations results (aka artifacts) to Network. So, you need to be online at least for 2min + the time that it will need to upload the artifacts.
An extra comment, Client by default saves all the artifacts to RPi memory, this happens for avoiding multiple reads/writes to the sdcard in order to extend its life. So, if you intent to be online only for some hours/minutes per day, you will need to make sure that memory will not be full or to change the directory where artifacts are saved, maybe to an external storage. The latter can be done in the advanced options in satnogs-setup.