Ham Radio Sgate

SatNOGS Software
1

Here is a question for the software gurus. I’m strictly hardware.

Amateur Radio operators are far and few in Australia especially away from the big cities. What we need down under are more Sgates to recover APRS data from the APRS satellites and send it to aunz.aprs2.net.

Easy enough to do with an Antenna, Raspberry Pi, rtl-sdr and direwolf. I had one running for a while.

I have 2 RPis for satnogs station 568 & 724 and one RPi for dump1090 running 24/7. I really don’t want to add another system when I basically have all the hardware already in my VHF 568 station. It already collects data on 145.825MHz and sends it to a database via the internet. (SatNOGS) My Solar panels are starting to struggle to keep the batteries topped up to run all this. (Winter down under)

If only there was a way to send this data to aunz.aprs2.net as well as to Satnogs.
Is it in the right format? AX.25? I don’t know.
Is it a wacky idea or can it be done? What are the show stoppers?
I know a lot is happening at the moment with all the new satellites so this may have to sit on the back burner for a while.
Thanks for thinking about it.
73 Bob vk2byf

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2

I guess the difference here is that data relayed via a satellite iGate isn’t really satellite telemetry - so I’m not really sure it belongs in the SatNOGS telemetry database.

For a while I was running direwolf alongside my SatNOGS station, with a modification to the FM Demodulation flowgraph that emitted the demodulated samples to localhost via UDP. Direwolf would run constantly, and if there happened to be an ISS/Whatever APRS pass, it would demodulate the AFSK and iGate it. In fact, (after a bit of searching) I found my notes on this here: https://gist.github.com/darksidelemm/61649608da4e96b8a966a679bc31d14f

After a few months of running it, I eventually decided that there were enough satgates in my area that me looking at APRS wasn’t the most efficient use of my SatNOGS station’s time, and stopped doing it.