My RF gain doesn’t seem to be setting on observations, so they upload as very near waterfall blanks.
I have a recent install on two almost identical groundstations that are recently updated. Only difference is antenna. Nooelec nano3 SDR . Quadfilar antennas for both.
When I follow the wiki instructions to set the gain, around 30 was correct for no LNA and with a 20 dB LNA around 10 was correct for both stations. Given that I’m setting up in an aluminum siding house I’m not getting good signals but I don’t expect it until final installation in the rafters of a high garage attic. However connecting to cubicSDR remotely I get excellent reception of local broadcast FM, NOAA weather radio, etc. If I turn the gain way down to zero I get a blank waterfall and crank it up to 45 and its pure white (and somewhat distorted) as you’d expect. I have the exact gain figures written down somewhere, but UHF was a little higher around 13 and VHF was around 10 with my LNA to cause the noise level to boost with cubicsdr. Anyway the point is not using satnogs software but using soapysdr and connecting remotely and using cubicsdr on my desktop the hardware works really well with sensible results.
However, it doesn’t seem to matter how I configure in satnogs-setup, regardless if I set satnogs_rf_gain to 0 or 45 or anywhere in between, the uploaded waterfall is pale blue with some noise, birdies but generally not much signal as if the gain is set to zero rather than the configured value. That seems kinda weird to me.
Uploads and connection to the network are fine, its just low RF levels. On both systems.
I set debug level to debug and didn’t see any interesting error messages. It does log every doppler correction freq change which is a lot of logs, but searching at the start and end found no errors.
The entire config in satnogs-setup using option “Show” can be seen below, obviously this was a during high gain run, although setting it to zero has no change in waterfall output:
│satnogs_antenna: RX│
│satnogs_api_token: (deleted)│
│satnogs_log_level: DEBUG│
│satnogs_rf_gain: '45’│
│satnogs_rx_samp_rate: 2.048e6│
│satnogs_soapy_rx_device: driver=rtlsdr│
│satnogs_station_elev: '290’│
│satnogs_station_id: '1510’│
│satnogs_station_lat: '43.028435’│
│satnogs_station_lon: ‘-88.250514’
I set my RF gain in the Advanced settings its not in Basic settings.
SoapySDRUtil --probe reports
######################################################
Soapy SDR – the SDR abstraction library
######################################################
Probe device
[INFO] [UHD] linux; GNU C++ version 8.3.0; Boost_106700; UHD_3.15.0.0-2
RtApiAlsa::getDeviceInfo: snd_pcm_open error for device (default), No such file or directory.
Found Rafael Micro R820T tuner
Found Rafael Micro R820T tuner
– Device identification
driver=RTLSDR
hardware=R820T
origin=https://github.com/pothosware/SoapyRTLSDR
rtl=0
– Peripheral summary
Channels: 1 Rx, 0 Tx
Timestamps: NO
Other Settings:
* Direct Sampling - RTL-SDR Direct Sampling Mode
[key=direct_samp, default=0, type=string, options=(0, 1, 2)]
* Offset Tune - RTL-SDR Offset Tuning Mode
[key=offset_tune, default=false, type=bool]
* I/Q Swap - RTL-SDR I/Q Swap Mode
[key=iq_swap, default=false, type=bool]
* Digital AGC - RTL-SDR digital AGC Mode
[key=digital_agc, default=false, type=bool]
– RX Channel 0
Full-duplex: YES
Supports AGC: YES
Stream formats: CS8, CS16, CF32
Native format: CS8 [full-scale=128]
Stream args:
* Buffer Size - Number of bytes per buffer, multiples of 512 only.
[key=bufflen, units=bytes, default=262144, type=int]
* Ring buffers - Number of buffers in the ring.
[key=buffers, units=buffers, default=15, type=int]
* Async buffers - Number of async usb buffers (advanced).
[key=asyncBuffs, units=buffers, default=0, type=int]
Antennas: RX
Full gain range: [0, 49.6] dB
TUNER gain range: [0, 49.6] dB
Full freq range: [23.999, 1764] MHz
RF freq range: [24, 1764] MHz
CORR freq range: [-0.001, 0.001] MHz
Sample rates: 0.25, 1.024, 1.536, 1.792, 1.92, 2.048, 2.16, 2.56, 2.88, 3.2 MSps
journalctl -u satnogs-client.service is extraordinarily verbose in DEBUG mode but doesn’t report any errors or have any commentary at all about gain settings.
Advanced - Support looks like this:
Generating support report. Please wait…
------------[ copy here ]------------
{
“versions”: {
“satnogs-client”: “1.3.1”,
“satnogs-client-ansible”: “202004031132”,
“satnogs-flowgraphs”: “1.1.1-1”,
“gr-satnogs”: “2.1.2-1”,
“gr-soapy”: “2.1.2-1”,
“gnuradio”: “3.8.1.0~rc1-2”,
“satnogs-config”: “0.10.1”
},
“state”: {
“is-applied”: true,
“pending-tags”: null
},
“system”: {
“distribution”: {
“DESCRIPTION”: “Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)”,
“RELEASE”: “10”,
“CODENAME”: “buster”,
“ID”: “Raspbian”
},
“pending-updates”: false,
“platform”: {
“system”: “Linux”,
“node”: “satnogs-uhf”,
“release”: “4.19.97-v7+”,
“version”: “#1294 SMP Thu Jan 30 13:15:58 GMT 2020”,
“machine”: “armv7l”,
“processor”: “”
},
“memory”: {
“total”: 971055104,
“available”: 787542016,
“percent”: 18.9,
“used”: 105095168,
“free”: 565510144,
“active”: 253542400,
“inactive”: 78622720,
“buffers”: 27848704,
“cached”: 272601088,
“shared”: 18632704,
“slab”: 52875264
},
“disk”: {
“total”: 61384400896,
“used”: 3768238080,
“free”: 55075192832,
“percent”: 6.4
}
},
“configuration”: {
“satnogs_antenna”: “RX”,
“satnogs_api_token”: “[redacted]”,
“satnogs_rf_gain”: “45”,
“satnogs_rx_samp_rate”: “2.048e6”,
“satnogs_soapy_rx_device”: “driver=rtlsdr”,
“satnogs_station_elev”: “290”,
“satnogs_station_id”: “1510”,
“satnogs_station_lat”: “43.028435”,
“satnogs_station_lon”: “-88.250514”
}
}
------------[ copy end ]-------------