Groundstations Gallery

pierros · March 31, 2015, 12:09pm

Hey all,

This is a topic to gather all SatNOGS Ground station pics Share your progress or your complete SatNOGS station proudly here!

Also, to brighten things up a bit, for every ground station you post, we will be sending you a Swag Pack (stickers, t-shirt and vinyl cut logo for your station!) Post away!

cshields · April 26, 2015, 10:36pm

The KB9JHU station in beautiful Brown County Indiana (outside of Bloomington) is taking shape! I roughed the parts in today and took it out for a spin. In this setup it was on battery power, but had wifi connected back into the house just fine (see yagi near the ground) and I was able to test tracking with gpredict.

Here’s an embarrassingly messy look at the guts inside. I need to get some short usb cables to cut down on some of that clutter. The axis mounts are made of layers cut with a laser (thanks to @dosman). You will notice with the case we got that I had to offset the vertical axis to avoid a structural spine. Using a Beaglebone Black (in the yellow case)

Unfortunately I’m heading in to the office (cross country) in the morning so I had to tear it down for now, will work on controlling it with satnogs-client next weekend.

-cshields / KB9JHU

roto22 · June 27, 2015, 3:01am

Happy to finally be able to post in this thread! I finished my ground station tonight, just in time for Field Day. It’s working mechanically, except for a bit of erratic movement when the azimuth rotates. Still seems to track properly using gpredict though.

I won’t have a chance to test it with a radio until tomorrow, and I’m not sure I’ll actually be able to use it that much over the weekend with the setup we’ll have, but I’ll try to at least test it out a little bit. Happy to answer any questions about my specific device or anything else about the build.

–Todd / KB1ENW

izo · June 29, 2015, 11:03am

Well done Todd,
It looks good !

I have few questions

What 3d printer did you use and what kind of settings when printing ?
What kind of PVC pipe did you use
Where are you located ?
Would be great if you could take/upload somewhere high res pics of your setup.

I’m trying to build a station and at the moment I’m looking for hardware, I’m UK based.

Regards

m

roto22 · July 7, 2015, 12:49pm

Hi @izo,

Sorry for the delay in responding.

My printer is a Reprap Prusa i3. I don’t remember all the specifics of the printing, but I used ABS, and a layer height of .4 mm for everything but the worm gear, where I dropped it down to .1 mm.
I used standard 1" plumbing PVC
I’m in the US.
I will try to put up some additional pictures soon. Let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like to see in more detail.

–Todd

cshields · February 8, 2016, 1:53pm

KB9JHU v3 station is back!

Missing the VHF antenna which needs some repairs, so the duplexer is out of the picture as well. I added a waterproof PVC box to the top that houses the raspberry pi 2, sdr dongle, lna, satnogs power pcb, and wifi dongle (with the antenna on top). With this design I only have 1 cable coming down from the station: 12v power which runs up the PVC, through the station to the power PCB in the top box. It should handle the azimuth turns just fine.

It is about to brave the elements today as we expect snow, rain, and wind!