SatNOGS #1 in Athens, Greece

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Hello all!

10 days ago we deployed a SatNOGS v2 on top of hackerspace.gr in Athens, Greece. This is the first SatNOGS deployed on the field and we couldn’t help but thinking that this is a huge milestone and brings great pride to the team!

(obviously the front cap is closed at the finished deployment)

The deployment was pretty straightforward, with one UHF helical antenna (our VHF is still up for matching) and no SatNOGS client controlling it (still under development for connection to Network). We simply controlled it with gPredict and Gqrx. POE for powering it up and minimal weather shielding (just some silicone on and around the bolts of the box)

We were able to track and record many different satellite passes and we encountered some software issues with our arduino homing code (see Arduino problem with gPredict and rotctld for details) which we hotfixed :slight_smile: .

Congratulations to the whole SatNOGS team for the first deployment!

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Congratulations!

Does the mechanism operate normally considering it is unbalanced with only one antenna mounted?

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Interestingly enough it does! Most probably the fact that it is not really far away from the azimuth axis helps it a lot. And was totally OK with heavy winds and rain last week in Athens.

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Very cool!! This is on my short list on things to build. Just have to finish some other things first (I’m great at starting stuff, but not so good about finishing).

-Matt
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

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Great! Unluckily, due to some health reasons I wasn’t able to attend the last SatNOGS meetings. Perhaps in a later time, I’ll rush to do so!