Rotator script to go to the next observation

[dragonlost]

Hello.
At my job (Observatoire de Paris, Meudon site) I just finished the creation of the ground station that we decided to put on the project Satnogs.

By cons I noticed that unlike Gpredict, Satnogs do not position the antenna before the arrival of the satellite but began positioning only when the satellite began to appear in the sky.

As a result, I miss the first seconds of observation systematically because it is necessary that the rotor turns in the right direction.

I saw that we could put scripts in Satnogs, so I wondered if it would be possible to say to the rotor: At the end of observation position yourself on the first position of the next passage.

[danwhite]

Hi @dragonlost!

This post and software sounds like exactly what you are looking for:

SatNOGS Rotator Unwinder

Hi all, I’ve written a bit of code to ‘unwind’ the rotator I use on my SatNOGS station after a pass, which will hopefully lower the risk of the rotator hitting a limit during a pass and having to do a 360 degree ‘unwind’ motion in the middle of a pass. See here: https://github.com/darksidelemm/satnogs-unwinder From the repo: Motivation I operate SatNOGS station #232. It uses a RF HamDesign SPX-02 rotator, with a SPID Rot2Prog controller, and my setup is configured to provide 640 degrees of …

The general idea is to run a script at the end of the last observation that sets things up for the next scheduled pass.

Our station #834 already has a SATNOGS_POST_OBSERVATION_SCRIPT configured to save the raw waterfall data, so adding a function requires writing a small wrapper script that combines features.