First middle eastern team!

SatNOGS Hardware
1

Hi, We are students of communication & electronics engineering department trying to do SATNOGS project as senior project. We just started to collect some knowledge about STANOGS and we have some questions:

  1. I heard that helical antenna is better than yagi antenna, So it is better to build a helical antenna or to order one?

  2. How can we connect the SDR with our antenna ??

  3. As a beginners is it better to start with V2 or V3 version ??

Thanks and I hope to help us out so we can build our first ground station in the middle east =)

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Hello and welcome to SatNOGS. Hopefully you’ll be up and running in no time at all. Hopefully you’ll get a chance to read through the wiki and get a good understanding of the different types of setup. Lets have a go at the questions.

  1. Assuming you are talking about directional antennas for a rotator setup. Both can be used and both have advantages and disadvantages. Ask 10 people and you’ll get 10 different opinions. Suffice to say that a helical is a fixed either RHCP or LHCP depending on the winding, yagi’s can be horizontal, vertical or either RHCP or LHCP but need harnesses to achieve that. Yagis are easier to build.

  2. If you are using a single antenna and a simple rtl-sdr or one of the currently supported sdr’s then it is straightforward. Just connect the dongle (for example) to the antenna feed point with some suitable 50 Ohm coax. RG174 is small and easy to use but is a bit lossy. Larger sizes are less lossy but harder to connect to the small dongle connectors.

  3. My advice would be to go for the v3. But also get used to the software by running a fixed (no rotator) setup to start with, you’ll get started quicker and can build the rotator in the background.

Keep asking questions if you need help and welcome to SatNOGS

Alex, g7kse

2 Likes
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Indeed if you want to get used to working with the SatNOGS Network I suggest you start by the getting started page of the wiki and start building a “no-rotator” setup. For quick questions you might want to join the SatNOGS channel at irc.freenode.net or via Matrix (which keeps a log of the channel conversations too!

Looking forward to see the middle east on-line!