Hi All,
I’m IU2HZJ from north of Italy.
I’m a Telecommunication Engineer passionate to Space and Micro-satellite and Electronic.
I built a alt-azimuthal two bands (VHF and UHF) antenna.
Nice to meet You, all
Francesco
4 Likes
Hi to both Pavel and Francesco. Feel free to ask any questions you want here and there is a growing wiki. If you need quick answers / conversation then the irc / matrix channel is a good place to go.
Hope to seeing and using your ground stations on the network soon
73
Alex
2 Likes
Wecome Pavel! It looks like you are well underway. If you have questions, there are plenty of people around in the community that can help.
–Konrad
Francesco, it’s a pleasure to meet new people on SatNOGS. Welcome. Are your antennas controllable by the rotator system used by SatNogs? Do you have your receiver up and running yet?
–Konrad
Hi Alex,
thank you for your welcome. I ended up my ground station in testing mode a few days ago. I use simple reception hardware (RTL tuner without LNA, 30 meters of coax cable, simple QFH antenna), I surprised how it works.
I am planning to build the second ground station on my cottage in the future. I have to solve stable internet connection at first. I would like to test my 3d printed rotators there. I hope I will be successful.
73 de Pavel OK1PHU
Hi Konrad,
thank you for your welcome. As I wrote to Alex, I am surpised how it works.
73 de Pavel OK1PHU
1 Like
Hi everyone
As a new user, I’m gonna shamelessly hijack this topic for a quick sanity check about my project and hopefully receive some useful pointers.
I’m an electrical engineer from Belgium and very enthusiast about space and radio. I am not a ham operator, and exclusively working on packet radio. I’m part of The Things Network, a global crowd sourced IoT network using LoRaWAN in the UHF band (868MHz). We’ve deployed some gateways to provide citywide coverage in the city of Ghent, where we have access to some very nice (high) locations with clear views horizon-to-horizon.
It has always been a dream of mine to receive weather images directly from space, so for my next project I want to build a xHRPT receiving station using a dish or coil antenna, a rotator, an Airspy mini and a suitable software client. To start and learn however, I would begin with a turnstile antenna, a RTL-SDR I can borrow from a friend and APT image reception.
Some questions I still have:
- What would be the best client software? I’m leaning towards satnogs because it seems to have everything nicely integrated (rotator control, Airspy support, even APT decoding?) and I have no problems making my setup available to the community when I’m not using it myself.
- For HRPT, it seems most decoders are Windows based? While satnogs and associated tools seem Linux oriented.
- Any people have experience with HRPT reception and decoding? It seems to be much less documented than the ubiquitous APT.
- Could the satnogs rotator be used for tracking with a dish antenna as well?
Any other tips are also much appreciated.
Thank you!
1 Like
The client software of choice is the SatNOGS client software for a Raspberry Pi.
–Konrad
There’s no real reason why a dish could not be mounted on a SatNogs rotator. There’s a limitation with geostationary and geosynchronous satellites where there’s no real start and end to an observation. I’ve asked for a fix so that Inmarsat satellites could be observed on L-Band. The response was a little less than enthusiastic.
–Konrad
Welcome to Satnogs, Epyon.
I think you can start with receiving weather images on the NOAA and Meteor series of satellites.
This is the easiest SatNOGS setup for receiving weather satellite pictures.
137 MHz Turnstile antenna → RTL/SDR → Raspberry Pi —> Internet
–Konrad
1 Like
There’s plenty of enthusiasm for the feature, especially as Es’hail 2 nears completion. Unfortunately this is also a huge technical limitation, given the current way we calculate things across both the network and the client (using pyephem). The function we use assumes there will be an orbit to calculate (see next_pass in the docs)… So, adding support for geo sats will require a lot of refactoring.
Not saying it is impossible, just a lot of work will need to be done to make it happen and not break the current functionality for orbital sats, and it is a feature currently unplanned for. I’ve filed this issue for tracking. 
3 Likes
Thanks for the updates on both the geo-sat support and the radio astronomy group.
–Konrad
Hello all!
I am Daniel Dahan and I’m from Modiin, Israel.
I love everything releated to space!
I’m a volunteer in some Space related projects both for education and research.
I think this platform can be very good to accomplish some of my ideas. 
2 Likes
Hi Daniel,
There’s loads of resources here and on the wiki, if you need any pointers then just ask. Either here or on Matrix /IRC
Alex
Hello everyone,
Please allow me to introduce myself to the group. My name is David Gelkin, and I’m new to this forum. I will start my journey with the Libre Space foundation, by constructing with a few friends a rotator for the SatNOGS project.
We are each looking forward to the challenge, as well as the educational value we will each gain by working on this project.
A little about myself: I’m an embedded systems engineer/developer and space hobbyist/fan. As you can imagine (I am sure like some of you), I’ve got big dreams of working for pay within the space industry at some point in the near future.
I’m truly looking forward to our journey together.
3 Likes
Hi @kerosene98 – glad you’re here! There’s lots of info on https://wiki.satnogs.org, and rotator assembly info at https://ohai.satnogs.org/. If you run into any problems, ask away.
1 Like
thanks for the links and info. Are you working on a project currently? If so can you talk about it? Would love to hear what others are up to and get inspiration etc
oh and btw @saintaardvark I was thinking about how to promote/market/brand the project activities as we progress the project. As the end goal is to build up a “work” resume of achieved practical results. Are most people blogging their activities or Instagramming etc or all of the social media channels? Would www.Wix.com be recommended or some other service?
Sorry for the quick succession of questions
I see quite a bit on Twitter (Its my preferred place). You might think about that as a good way of reaching a good audience. Is Wix a website platform? looks like it.
Alex
1 Like