It is time we meet regularly as a community to help newcomers and get people started on building ground stations.
When would you like to meet next Sunday?
0 voters
cc’ing @tokitattoomtl, @JayAreZee, @lids @VictoriaMoffatDixon @spacecowboy @F5VLB @xof @PE0SAT @csete @cshields and others!
The meeting will happen in https://appear.in/satnogs
Good idea! I am away visiting some family this Sunday but hopefully I can join next time.
OK It is final! See you this Sunday 2016-09-25 on 18:00 UTC
You can check your time using this link
See ya all!
Unfortunately, we were unable to conduct the call today due to network issues 
The platform was not suitable for multiple connections and people were dropping in and out.
We would like to apologize for the inconvenience. We will make sure to arrange a call on a proper video-call platform as soon as possible.
Thanks for everyone that showed up today, and our apologies once again.
In spite of the network issues experienced with the system, there were several new people who had various introductions and conversations. These are my incomplete notes from what I was able to hear.
Participants whom I was able to write down, there were several more I missed (let us know!):
Whuzzup with all the Greeks? Space things must be in the water or something…
Pierros gave a nice status update but the audio link for me gave out after the first 30% or so. I’m sure it was update-ative 
Congratulations, by the way, to LibreSpaceFoundation and University of Patras people on your successful delivery of UPSat!
After a bit, the room ended up with myself (AD0CQ or etihwnad on IRC), @lids, and @PE0SAT.
We talked about some of the basic internal operation of satnogs-client and satnogs-network (pre GNU Radio changes).
Jan talked about his and DK3WN’s telemetry forwarder http://tlm.pe0sat.nl/. The system is designed to collect satellite telemetry frame data with a small amount of metadata (NORAD ID, receiver callsign, timestamp, rx lat/lon). Reception, demodulation, and decoding to a (hex) bit string are all performed outside of this system. The frames are then HTTP POST’ed to a server for storage.
There is a MS Visual Basic forwarding client at that URL. There are also some GNU Radio blocks that assemble and forward the frames start here: https://github.com/daniestevez/gr-sids.
I found Jan’s observation about new people to satellites to be interesting. Most have good IT-type skills and have no problems with those aspects of a system. It is a lack of RF knowledge that seems to be common. Antennas, noise figure, filtering, matching, doppler, etc (Dan: traditional ham stuff?). Jan’s excellent website makes him a magnet for questions and advice from new cubesat teams. It is difficult to substitute the experience of receiving signals from space with a handheld radio and simple antenna.
I wonder if something like HAMPADS would be a good entry point. The mobile tracking app and “arm-strong” rotator are a really creative solution.
Another discussion area was where or what interfaces to standardize and where to explicitly avoid standards to allow innovation within a ground system. No conclusions for sure there!
IMHO, this is an area that the SatNOGS community can drive in cooperation with other existing G/S users. The SatNOGS contribution is then a) the documented standards, and b) a reference implementation with examples interfacing to other common systems (like GEMS, and other common CCSDS standards)
Please correct my mistakes if you were there also!
–Dan
I’m just curious if there are plans for another community call? It was really good to be able to talk to a few of you who I have only read posts from, or from their online pages. I think the occasional check-in is an awesome idea!
Kind regards,