SatNOGS
Satellite Networked Open Ground Stations
Dan White AD0CQ
MicroHAMS 2022-10-18
Electrical and Computer Engineering�dan.white@valpo.edu
@ValpoWIREDlab
AD0CQ
Dan White
Core Contributor
§ 97.113 Prohibited transmissions.
(a) No amateur station shall transmit:
…
(3) Communications in which the station licensee or control operator has a pecuniary interest, including communications on behalf of an employer, with the following exceptions:
…
(iii) A control operator may accept compensation as an incident of a teaching position during periods of time when an amateur station is used by that teacher as a part of classroom instruction at an educational institution.
Founded in 2014 - Athens, Greece
Projects designed to develop open source space technologies
Libre Space Projects
Libre Space Manifesto
What is the problem
that SatNOGS is solving?
Build satellite
→ Build ground station!
next thought:
9
Satellite building 101:
This is a painful process involving 4+ apps...
Goal of SatNOGS - Automate the process!
..and keep it free / open source / open data!
✔ Automate the satellite tracking
✔ Automate the RF demodulation and tuning
✔ Automate the doppler shift changes
✔ Automate the data decoding
✔ Automate the uploading of artifacts
statistics
most plots from
Growth over time
Scheduling is … NP-hard
SatNOGS Architecture
Data ecosystem
Journey from antenna to dashboard
db.satnogs.org
dashboard.satnogs.org
Reference Ground Station
no rotator
Hardware Reference: Raspberry Pi3 + rtlsdr
★any SDR supported by SoapySDR (samplerate limited by Pi)
LNA highly recommended
LNA4ALL or others.
We are working on an �open hardware LNA design.
Client updates
‘sudo satnogs-setup’
Will update both the client and gr-satnogs
New releases are announced on forums, mailing list, twitter, and facebook
Hardware
...or go with a fixed antenna (cheaper/easier, but not quite as good)
Upgrades
no Ham leaves a good thing untouched
SatNOGS Auto Scheduler
https://gitlab.com/librespacefoundation/satnogs/satnogs-auto-scheduler
This is a tool to automatically compute passes of satellites and schedule observations on the SatNOGS Network.
priorities.txt
fill in other sats
Vision
(my version)
Imagine a carpet of ground stations
→ coverage is more important than individual performance
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Imagine a carpet of ground stations
What if:
SatNOGS station on every public library?
(showing only 5% of CONUS!)
32
https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/main-libraries-branches-and-bookmobiles-fy-2014-public-libraries-survey-outlet-data
Engage
open issues
ideas — projects — holes
Data, Data, all is open Data
Tools
Join us!