Hi everyone.
In trying to set up a ground station, and I have built a QFH that I am not sure works yet. I wanted to get the configuration for my raspberry pi first. I’m using a 3B+ and temporarily have my Yagi set up on my balcony just to see if I can get anything, I’ve received with the Yagi before so that works fine. If the waterfall was blank I would assume it was my location on my balcony, but my observations are just failing.
If I can provide anything else to help troubleshoot I will. internet connection I know is stable as I have been SSH’ing into the Pi from my home computer. I also confirmed from the logs that it got the planned observation data from the server/database.
We will need the logs to find out possible errors, to find the logs check the yellow boxes at the top of the troubleshooting page (in case you run the legacy version check yellow boxes on this page).
Unfortunately there isn’t something useful in the logs part you pasted
I suggest you set the debug level to INFO, check here how, and then schedule an observation and cope past again the logs.
While you have provided part of your configuration in the first post, in order to have the complete picture can you please also copy paste the support report? To generate it go to the menu item Advanced -> Support in sudo satnogs-setup.
@phantom31…One of the things I always like to do with a new SatNOGS setup is test the hardware config to make sure it is receiving ok. A great thing about RPI’s is that you can pull out the SD card and stick another one in…do your testing, get it sorted then go back the the SatNOGS software.
Because this is only a temporary thing I normally burn a copy of PiSDR onto a different SD card…connect up a screen/KB & mouse and fire up GQRX. It is very simple to use and you should easily be able to listen to local ground based signals. I use it to get the optimin gain value for putting into the SatNOGS config. You could then look at the predictions for a strong satellite that is pretty active like the ISS and see what you can hear. If that all works go back to your SatNOGS SD card and see how you go.
One other thing to remember is that if your antenna does not have a clear view of the sky you are limiting your passes that will receive signals. This is very true for apartments.
Most cubesats go up over the poles so for the best view of the pass you need to face east-ish or west-west-ish to see perhaps half the passes a normal station would see. If you face north or south you will probably see less…the ISS goes up to I think about 50-ish degrees and is very strong so that is my pick for testing sats if you are at a high latitude.
Do the INFO debug suggested by @fredy. It is really helpful. You can see a lot of what is going on but not be overwhelmed by data with that setting.
