This weekend members from our core team of developers attended FOSDEM in Brussels Belgium for a scheduled lightning talk about the project. At Saturday the showcase the mobility features of the SatNOGS Ground Station they assembled one on the spot in under one hour. For more than six hours the members of the team had… Continue Reading
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… Continue Reading
After a nice code push, scheduling observation functionality is now complete in SatNOGS Network website. The website is now able to dynamically calculate and schedule observation windows given a satellite for all available Ground Stations. The functionality works like this: The observer enters the New Observation page. After selecting a Satellite and associated Transponder desired,… Continue Reading
We’ve been thinking for some time that there is no need to install two separate RTL-SDR dongles to cover both VHF and UHF. It increases power consumption on WR703N without actually having any benefit, as using two dongles simultaneously is limited by the CPU power and network bandwidth. A diplexer would allow the connection of… Continue Reading
The SatNOGS Network website has had the focus in terms of development from our software team in the past week. While the major functionality (observation calculation and scheduling) is coming along nicely (thanks to libraries like python-ephem) we are also delivering other needed functionality. This time it was a public, well documented, open API. Based… Continue Reading
In order to achieve global coverage, a network of Ground Stations would have to have nodes in places that are not entirely friendly environments. Desert hot, ice cold, gusty, monsoon rainy, mountain dry and forest humid could be some descriptions of possible locations SatNOGS would have to survive in. Apart from the obvious networking considerations… Continue Reading
Most of the times you would want your ground station to be stable. Secured on a metal beam on top of a building, protected, homed and zeroed where no-one and nothing could disturb it. That is the ideal situation. For those of us though that like adventures and want to carry a ground station with… Continue Reading
Continuing the development of SatNOGS Network, we focused on enhancing the observation results page. Check out how it looks overall: What is new? Timeline The new timeline view gives a quick overview on the data that each ground station collected within the observation timeframe. On the left you can see the list of the Ground… Continue Reading
An important part of the instrumentation of our ground station is the Antennas. Early on the SatNOGS team designed and constructed 2 Yagis for UHF and VHF bands. The UHF Yagi design was essentially a cross Yagi design trying to address the circular polarization issue. Based on the experimental operation of the ground station we… Continue Reading
The time we’ve all been waiting for, has come. We are proud to release v2 of SatNOGS Ground Station (Tracking Box) with many upgrades and fixes from the previous version. Notably: Redesigned Axis Gear Assemblies. They are now smaller, more robust and reliable based around a much more powerful NEMA 17 Stepper Motor. The two… Continue Reading