Putting satnogs station to work

SatNOGS Software
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If I want my station to work at full capacity do I need to install autoscheduler on my RPI or can I just target utilization to some value and others will be able to schedule observations? I’ve tested if it returns any usable signal and I just want it to do some work before I figure out how to upgrade it.

Right now I schedule and flag stuff manually. Of course if someone could vet my classifications that would be awesome as well, I’m trying my best when comparing to other classifications and reading documentation examples.

https://network.satnogs.org/stations/2220/

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My station makes about 1,500 observations per month (50 observations per day on average).

Of these, about 66% are run by my own auto scheduler task.

My task cron job looks like this:

*/15 *  * * * ~/satnogs-auto-scheduler/schedule_single_station.py -s 1272 -d 0.3 -m 80

Every 15 minutes, the auto scheduler adds observations for the next 20 minutes (0.3 hours). This way, my station is always available to anyone who plans their observation at least 20 minutes in advance (which most people do), but unused time is filled with observations whenever possible.

So far my station has uploaded a bit more than 500 GB of IQ files to Dropbox.

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Thanks I’m now trying it out only added

~/satnogs-auto-scheduler/env/bin/python before script name since I had it installed in virtual env. Those IQ files is the raw data collected by the station right? Is it also stored somewhere on station premises or in cloud?

wav.xz - so they are simply xz-compressed wav files containing raw data? Nice, I’ll need to dig into that - I have more background in image processing of astronomical data, but this looks sweet.

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Yes, the raw data. They are uploaded from the ramdisk on the station to Dropbox and deleted locally to make room for the next observation. I decided to compress them before upload because that saves quite a lot of space. More details in Uploading compressed IQ files to Dropbox (or any other cloud storage provider)

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Also take a look at this addon for using gr-satellites with SatNOGS. Then you will be able to decode more satellites:

//Lars

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@SM0TGU I’ve installed it according to instructions - where can I find list of satellite signals in VHF that it can decode?

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There is no ready-made list of satellites - you have to choose the satellites by yourself.
A very good satellite to start with is NAYIF-1 (ID 42017).
//Lars

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I see that it automatically selected DELFI-N3XT here SatNOGS Network - Observation 4357675 and previously I had no decodes for it - does it look ok? It decoded a bunch of data.

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Ok, bunch of data decoded from FUNCUBE SatNOGS Network - Observation 4357688 so I assume this works nicely . What else is possible to achieve with omnidirectional VHF antenna?

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@michal.drzal Congrats!
All of the active FunCude satellites with BPSK are easy to receive with omni VHF antenna.

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@SM0TGU @EelkeVisser is it possible to have both GitHub - kng/satnogs_gr-satellites: First try on combining gr-satellites with the satnogs-client and satnogs-flowgraphs and Meteor M2 working? I had working Meteor 2 decoding but after following the satnogs_gr-satellites tutorial the images are not longer decoded. I’ve tried to have both in post observation script:

python /home/pi/satnogs-extras/scripts/process_meteor.py --id "$1" --tle "$3"
/usr/local/bin/satnogs-post "$1" "$2" "$3" "$4" "$5" "$6"

And everything works, no error just no decodes - it looks like .s files are not generated for process_meteor.py to decode.

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Hi @michal.drzal yes that is possible to have both. I am currently running both. Without a log file it is difficult to guess what goes wrong. Please check:

journalctl -f -u satnogs-client.service -n 500

The two lines of the post observation script look ok, to me. But If you don’t get *.s files then it must be in step 1 of my howto: Howto: Meteor M2 weather satellite image decoding Also I see in your failed observation a bandwith of +/- 20kHz, meaning the LRPT flowgraph was not running. It probably used a default FM or so.

When I updated the satnogs installation from 1.4 to 1.5.1, the file flowgraphs.py got overwritten. I needed to add the LRPT decoder again. Secondly, the 1.5 installation has a few new features, which breaks compatibility. I needed to add some arguments to the def argument_parser() in satnogs_lrpt_demod.py. Can you just check/redo step 1 of the Meteor Howto again? I had updated the first post to work with the new version.

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You are probably right - I’ll check that but yes - I’ve performed update of satnogs. I’ll edit this post later and provide more info.

Yes, update reverted flowgraphs.py back into vanilla.

BTW are you aware of any additional packages that can extend basic satnogs besides meteor and satnogs_gr-satellites?

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Good, that you found the problem.

Not really. There is another platform that tracks satellites: https://tinygs.com/ But that is not Satnogs. Of course you could track other stuff, like ships with AIS, and planes with ADS.

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