I work for University of New Mexico and I currently operate VHF/UHF ground station. I’m planning on adding S-Band to our existing system and I’m planning the build out of another system for a large research organization. We want to plug into your network and share resources. What do we need to do?
What is the current state of the network? Is there somewhere I can “login” and view participating stations?
What resources are exactly shared on the network? Can you schedule viewing time and data downloads currently?
Here’s a picture of our VHF, and UHF antenna mast.
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Jonathan,
This is awesome!! That’s a great looking setup and we can definitely make good use of it.
There are 2 websites right now, dev and prod, respectively https://network-dev.satnogs.org and https://network.satnogs.org From here, approved observers can schedule satellite observations in windows of time and whatever operational stations are passed by that satellite in that time are fed the details (window time, TLE, freq). The client then records and uploads the observed audio. Going a step further into decoding will be in the future. So, in terms of what gets ‘shared on the network’ it is just the audio collected by the station. This data is all shared by a creative commons license. So the idea is to have an autonomous station that takes jobs from the network and returns audio.
The state of the project is still a bit young but depending on your full stack we can start producing results quickly. The way it works is we have a client that controls the rotor via rotctld calls, and records audio while handling doppler shift in SDR. If you have a hardware radio setup with this station support for that is easy too and doppler shift would be handled through rigctld.
So, your physical rotor is obvious - leaving the radio setup as the fork in our discussion. Would you be planning on setting up something with RTLSDR or do you have a hardware radio and is it supported for control by hamlib/rigctld?
Either way, the client software is in linux and reference platforms are small computers (ie: Raspberry Pi 2) so you could set one of them up as a dedicated client or use an existing desktop.
If you are ready to dive in, feel free to make an account on network-dev and network with the time comes. We have client install instructions here, with specific walk throughs for a couple of platforms (like the raspberry pi 2) but would also adapt to other linux environments as well:
http://docs.satnogs.org/client/installation.html
you can also find us on irc, #satnogs on freenode if you are familiar with that.
(I have an issue assigned to myself to write docs specific to a hardware radio setup, I should get it written up this weekend)
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