I have a spare laptop, a fairly good SDRplay SDR hooked up to a pair of QFH antennas with preamps.
Is there a way of running a SatNOGS client on a laptop? The SDPplay only works properly on Windows but I have other SDRs which could run on Gqrx.
Welcome to SatNOGS, Bob!
If you are running Linux on the laptop then yes it is possible, (a distro and version with a working gnuradio stack, I think the last time I tried this was Ubuntu 17.10, others have experienced a lot of issues with gnuradio on 18.x). However the SDRplay won’t work with the driver we use currently (that may change in the future). That said, this is an undocumented process so if you’re willing to accept a lot of pain then please proceed, otherwise I’d suggest buying a Raspberry Pi 3 as our image works out-of-the-box. You’ll need the latest gr-satnogs package for amd64, and satnogsclient should be installable with pip. I’m sure you’ll run into missing dependencies for each that I’m not remembering. From there, you’ll need to configure some way of managing the service (systemd or supervisord) as well as set all of the environment variables correctly.
There’s an outdated doc on setting it up manually on a Fedora raspi that may help fill in some of the blanks.
Now, all of that said, I really encourage you to get a raspberry pi 3. We have an image that is not only preconfigured to run SatNOGS out of the box but we have a satnogs-setup app that helps you to configure and keep the client and gr-satnogs up to date easily. The raspberry pi is our reference platform that we use for client development and testing.
Cheers!
I confirm SatNOGS is running fine under Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 installed from sources (gitlab). However the install process is a bit hairy…
thanks! Did you use the ubuntu-provided gnuradio? No problems with that?
For the 18.04, I have not installed gnuradio by myself (I would remember!), I used the one from the distribution. Note also that I still have not done the last satnogs update.
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Stupid question.
How to use one laptop to support many SDRs? I need someone to help with a simple and fast installation SOP link. This way I don’t have to buy Ras Pi all the time.
Please can someone help me?
Not sure about the revival of this thread… But.
The simplest way I know is the dockerized solution, I’m running it on a RPi but it is really quite platform independent. There’s no official guide yet, but it’s coming. Here’s my sub-project for this.
And you can also have a look Debian | Amateur Radio – PEØSAT it is a bit outdated so if you have any questions, let me know.
Is this Debian on laptop solution can support for 4 or 5 SDR’s at same time?
This isn’t determined by the software, my laptop supports RTL-SDR, AirSPY, HackRF, USRP.
The challenge is the hardware, can it support the SDR radio’s, does it have enough resources and is the USB interface good enough.
This will need further investigation.
Most SDR devices have tools that can be used to test the operation of the device.
Some examples:
RTLSDR: rtl_test -s 2048000
AirSPY (R2 example): airspy_rx -r /dev/null -t 2 -a 10000000
HackRF: hackrf_transfer -r /dev/null -s 10000000
When running these commands look at the output and see if samples are dropped and this will be an indication if the hardware is sufficient.
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