Live satellite data

Satellites & Observations
1

Hello everyone,
My name is Moses. I am new to this community. This is my first post so apologies if I am a bit off topic.
Currently, my university has finished developing a CubeSat as part of the ongoing QB50 project. I was assigned the task of ground station software development as part of my PhD studies[im a new phd student]. The software is developed in GNU Radio for baseband processing and C++ for coding/decoding and framing/deframing. The modulation scheme used is GFSK @9k6. Framing is done in AX.25 and CubeSat Space Protocol(CSP). I was able to communicate with the satellite in the lab and now im looking for a way to communicate with orbiting satellites to verify the software before the satellite is launched sometime this year. Unfortunately, our ground station is located in Northern part of Sweden (Kiruna) whereby we wont be able to see our CubeSat once it is launched as it will be launched from the ISS. After a bit of reasearch, I found out that SatNOGS will be the perfect candidate for the job. Im quite new in this stuff and I therefore need to ask for guidance and references regarding the issues below

  1. Live data streaming. I have seen some telemetry files in SatNOGS database. Is there any API that would enable me to schedule and access live satellite data? If so, please provide me with instructions on how to do it as well as reference materials

  2. Access fee. I understand that this is an open source project which doesnt necessarily mean its free. However, I havent seen any reference on cost of using this network. Is there any cost associated with using this service?

  3. Scheduling an observation. In order to verify the ground station functionaly, the QB50 team asked every member of the project to try to cummunicate with the QB50P1 satellite. I can see that one user in this community has tried that already. The question I have is to how to do that? The network page asks for a login password. When I clicked it, it directed me to the community page where I was able to create an account. I was assuming that this account could be used for all services (database, network etc). Unfortunately, it is not working on the network part. Please advice.

Regards,
Moses.

1 Like
2

Hello Moses! Welcome to the community!

Some quick answers about SatNOGS as a Network.

  1. You can schedule observations from network.satnogs.org and retrieve decoded data (or audio recordings) from the API of the Network. DB can be used to display this data too, if a data decoder is present and identified.
  2. SatNOGS provides free data to everyone by publicly accessible APIs. In order to schedule an observation (using SatNOGS stations) you would need to join the Network with a ground station of your own. This ensures the growth of the network.
  3. See response on 2. (indeed we need to make it clear for everyone that this is the access criteria.)

Libre Space Foundation, the non-profit behind SatNOGS, is also finishing a satellite for QB50, UPSat, with downlink telemetry of GFSK@9600 too. I suppose we will have pretty similar needs for command and control too. (although we are not using CSP but rather ECSS command and control packets). We would love to discuss with you and your team on how you can join the network and make full use of it for your mission!

3

Hello Pierros,
Thanks for your reply.
Im happy to hear that you company is also involved in the QB50 project. We will be glad to add our ground station to the network and to discuss some general topics about QB50 TT&C. We are looking forward to hear back from you. You can contact me via my gmail account : mbkitine@gmail.com or the university account : moses.browne.mwakyanjala@ltu.se.
With best regards,
Moses Browne.