SatNOGS Activity Update 2019-07-08

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A Busy Few Weeks for New Satellites, Observations and Dashboards!

Between Rocketlab’s “make it rain”, Space X’s Falcon Heavy and the Soyuz launches over the last few weeks we have seen a lot of new satellites launched. Our community has been really busy scheduling observations, helping identify objects from early TLE and, of course, returning data and creating dashboards for them. Notably it has been fantastic that the community have been able to hear and create a dashboard for the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 mission and it’s fabulous we have had mentions and praise from their channels.

As mentioned the community has been busy and numerous new dashboard are appearing including Lightsail 2 (above) and ACRUX-1 (below) and many more. Check out all our available dashboards here.

Finally to keep track of all this particular batch of launches and their status regarding SatNOGS observations/TLE/Dashboards and more check out the following two posts on the Libre Space Foundation Community forum.

https://community.libre.space/t/kraksat-satellite/4236

https://community.libre.space/t/soyuz-2-1b-fregat-m-meteor-m-n2-2-launch-on-2019-07-05/4148

LA1K SatNOGS Antenna Build

dav

The amazing crew over at the Akademisk Radioklubb have been busy once again making more improvements to their SatNOGS station set up. Their latest blog has an update on their antenna builds. It’s great to see this thriving radio club’s activities and we are proud to have them on board!

Open Source Cubesat Workshop, Spread the word

We’ve talking a lot about OSCW on our social media channels this last week and its really exciting to see abstracts/submissions for talks start to arrive! We have (hopefully!) been reminding everyone why its an excellent idea (in our opinion) to come and join us at OSCW with some quotes from previous attendees like the one above from Daina Bouquin who is the  Head Librarian at Center for Astrophysics. Harvard & Smithsonian. If you are working on something space related using open source methodologies we would love to hear from you and you can send the OSCW team an abstract via this link.

SatNOGS Activity Update 2019-06-21

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NepaliSat-1 received by Nepal SatNOGS ground station

The SatNOGS network is beginning to receive transmissions from some new satellites deployed from the International Space Station earlier this week. Amongst them it was wonderful to see our Nepali friends at Orion Space receive a signal from NepaliSat-1, Nepal’s first Satellite. The successful observation was received via their SatNOGS ground station. Orion Space use SatNOGS as a teaching tool in their programs that enable students in Nepal to have experiences of space related technologies. We are proud to be a part of their toolkit.

A Busy ARISS Week

It’s been a busy week for ARISS with June 19th seeing a contact between King Island District High School in Currie, TAS, Australia and Astronaut David St-Jacques. Then yesterday, June 20th, a contact between Rowan Preparatory School in Claygate, UK and astronaut Nick Hague.

Both ARISS contacts were observed by numerous SatNOGS ground stations and example observations can be found and listened too via these links.

King Island District High School – Astronaut David St-Jacques

Rowan Preparatory School in Claygate, UK – Astronaut Nick Hague.

LSF Team at Ham Radio Friedrickshafen

Finally a massive shout out to all the LSF crew who are attending Ham Radio Friedrichshafen. They are displaying and talking about the range of Libre Space projects including of course SatNOGS. If you are attending the event do go and chat to them and find out more about our activities and how you can get involved. They are at stand A1-562.

SatNOGS Activity Update 2019-06-03

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Observations of the ISS Spacewalk Captured

On the 29th May cosmonauts,  Oleg Kononenko and Flight Alexey Ovchinin, undertook an EVA (spacewalk) outside the ISS to retrieve science experiments, install some new handrails and conduct some other routine maintenance. Numerous successful observations of the EVA were captured by ground stations on the network and you can listen to the EVA communications. This post on the Libre Space community forum has links to all the observations.

Antenna Types Comparison

SatNOGS legend Corey Shields has begun some comparative work on antennas. Corey is using the same location and the same observations to test directional ax/el yagi, a fixed low-gain yagi and finally a discone. It’s interesting work and Corey is posting his results and discussion here.

SatNOGS Activity Update 2019-05-07

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SatNOGS articles in Hackspace Magazine

This months Hackspace Magazine has a large feature around space and makers. The article features SatNOGS Libre Space, UPsat and much more. There is a complete tutorial on how to set up a ground station and even a short tutorial on a DIY Slim Jim antenna. Hackspace magazine is part of the Raspberry Pi group and as such the SatNOGS tutorial was reproduced on the main Raspberry Pi site. The issue is available to order a print copy or to download a free PDF via this page.

French Language SatNOGS Presentation

SatNOGS community member Jujun has delivered a talk to the ADRI 38 audience about SatNOGS. Whilst my french is not strong, it’s apparent from the video he gives lots of detail about different types of SatNOGS ground station setups and presents lots of antenna ideas. Many thanks Jujun.

SatNOGS at Hamvention and Other Upcoming Events

Very pleased that SatNOGS will be represented at Hamvention 2019 which takes place between May 17th-19th in Ohio, USA. If you are attending do make sure to come and see us at booth 1006. We have a lot of events globally coming up with a SatNOGS or Libre Space presence and a full list can be found on this post over on the Libre Space Page.

SatNOGS Activity Update 2019-04-11

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SatNOGS Community Help Kicksat Mission

Our fabulous community and in particular Cees Bassa helped out Zac Manchester in tracking down his Sprite satellites (a single PCB satellite that is around 35mm x 35mm) after they were deployed in a low earth orbit from the Kicksat2 cubesat mothership. Cees has been working on the Dwingeloo radio observatory and used this large dish to help track down these tiny craft. Exciting stuff.

Akademisk Radioklubb LA1K Station now online!

sdr

Our friends at the Akademisk RadioKlubb in Norway (who have been featured before here having helped a neighbouring station replace a rotator) have been busy and have commissioned another station. Named LA1K (which is the oldest operating call sign in Norway) we look forward to seeing lots of successful observations being returned by this great installation.

SatNOGS Activity Update 2019-02-21

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SatNOGS Client Update and gr-satnogs , Time to update your stations!

We are very proud to announce new releases for satnogs-client 3 and gr-satnogs 4.

Notable changes on satnogs-client:

  • Support demodulator for Reaktor Hello World 2 satellite
  • Sent observation frequency in metadata
  • Add option for manual power level range in waterfall (there is an issue with this one, there will be an update in satnogs-client-ansible 2 later that will fix this.)

Notable changes on gr-satnogs:

  • Golay (24, 12) decoder
  • Demodulating flowgraph for the Reacktor Hello World Satellite
  • Fix of the baud rate issue in BPSK gr-script

For updating your station through ansible script (satnogs-setup) follow the instructions in this wiki page section 13.

Note that before running satnogs-setup you will need to update the OS and reboot as is described in the instructions.

MySat-1 First Received On SatNOGS network

Excellent work by Mark Jessop scheduling this observation resulted in the first results from the MYSAT-1 via station 232 on this observation. He passed the observation back to MYSAT-1 via their twitter feed and they were thrilled to say he was the first to hear and expressed their thanks.

Dashboard for MYSAT-1

Following on from the above story our fabulous contributor Patrick DL4DP has put together a dashboard for the MYSAT-1 mission which is publicly available here

Decoding eshail 2 go using gr-satellites

Its been a busy week for Patrick! He has also put together this great tutorial post on how he has used gr-satellites to decode the BSPK 400bps beacon on the EsHail-2 QO-100 transponder based on some ideas he had seen from Dani EA4GPZ. Check out this post here on the libre space community forum.

Recent Slow Scan TV images from the ISS


The recent slow scan TV image transmissions from the International Space Station organized by Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) & NASA On The Air (NOTA) as received by SatNOGS 📡 stations globally!

Links to posts on the libre space community forum for each of these ISS SSTV events can be found here;

Feb7-Feb8: https://community.libre.space/t/sstv-iss-ariss-nota-sl…/3436
Feb15-Feb17: https://community.libre.space/t/sstv-iss-ariss-nota-sl…/3437

FOSDEM 2019

A little late with this update but many SatNOGS contributors and team members made the trip to FOSDEM 2019 and got an opportunity to promote SatNOGS and also work together on various projects. A couple of posts on the Libre Space site and the SDR Makerspace site cover the trip and the varied events and activities well. Interest in SatNOGS was, as ever, high and we have seen people we talked to on the booth registering on the Libre Space forum which is great to see.

SatNOGS Activity Update 2019-01-27

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Akademisk Radioklubb Repair LA1NGS Ground Station

This week a story from Trondheim Norway. We love this story because it shows the fabulous co-operative nature of the SatNOGS community. Established in 1923 Akademisk Radioklubb is the oldest amateur radio group in Norway. The group has been using the LA1NGS SatNOGS station to schedule observations. Owned by NTNU Small Satellite Lab and Orbit NTNU  they noticed that the rotator on LA1NGS had stopped working. Keen to help members of the Akademisk Radioklubb reached out and helped them replace the worn Yaesu G-5500 rotor with a new SPID SPX-02 . As reward they were given the G-5500 which they hope to refurbish and build their own station. More detail and lots of pictures on the Akademisk Radioklub blog.

Ground Station Hardware Report

Fabulous contributor Azisi has produced a useful report over on the Libre Space Foundation Community discussion forum. It collates the various hardware projects relating to creating ground station hardware and gives links to the repositories and to documentation. There is a real range of projects here from the rotator assembly through to small PCB notch filter to remove unwanted FM bands. Check out the post and get building here!

ARISS Contact Ashbury College Junior School, Ottawa Canada

Once again ground stations on the SatNOGS network captured a great ARISS conversation between a junior school and the international space station. For details of the contact and also to hear the observations themselves, be sure to check out the post on the Libre Space Foundation discussion forum.

SatNOGS Activity Update 2019-01-16

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Over 300 data contributors to SatNOGS Database

That’s right! Over 300 stations are now supplying data to the SatNOGS database. This group comprises of the ground stations on the SatNOGS network and also those stations that chose to add data manually. Huge thanks to everyone in the community working hard to achieve this. For statistics about the SatNOGS database visit this page.

Dashboard Development Continues

The team have been working hard to refine and redevelop the SatNOGS dashboard project. Major changes have taken place and with that, you may have noticed some satellites and dashboards not currently updating. To help follow progress, there’s a dashboard that shows daily decoded frames per satellite here. To follow updates and discussion on the dashboard project check out this thread on the Libre Space community page.

SatNOGS Demo Display from 35c3

Fabulous community member ar3itrary set up a great SatNOGS demo display at 35c3. A python script rendering the waterfall of the latest SatNOGS observation, to a nice info graphic is set to update every minute as a cron job. The python script is available here.

SatNOGS Activity Update 2019-01-05

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SatNOGS Dashboard

The SatNOGS dashboard is now live! Decoded telemetry data from SatNOGS db is pulled into a new database built using influxdb, in turn Grafana is then deployed to visualise the data. This tool will be useful for mission monitoring and also for outreach events. Documentation about the dashboard is available here.

GNU Radio Conference 2018 Keynote Uploaded

Videos from last years GNU Radio Convention 2018 (GRcon18) have now been published. Manolis did an excellent job delivering the keynote focusing on SatNOGS, whilst also covering wider aspects of the Libre Space Foundation. Check out the video above.

AutoScheduling

Over on the SatNOGS section of the Libre Space Foundation Forum there is activity and discussion around the development of an auto scheduling tool for stations. To facilitate the upcoming needs of the auto-scheduler some small updates have been pushed to the Network API and the SatNOGS database . Follow the progress and discussion on the forum here.

SatNOGS Activity Update 2018-12-20

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db.satnogs.org migration

So this week the team migrated the SatNOGS database to its new platform. This operation was crucial and ensures that we have a stable and well scalable database. Whilst the total data held on the database might not be huge, it contains a very large number of files.  Overall, the migration went well and downtime was kept to a minimum.  We would like to thank the team for their hard work making this a flawless process. 

How to Schedule an Observation blogpost

This week a blog appeared with a walk through of screenshots explaining how a ground station owner schedules observations on the SatNOGS network. This aspect of the SatNOGS network is accessible only once someone has a station set up therefore it’s helpful  to show people  how easy they are to use once they do! Check out the blog here. 

ARISS Contact Kenilworth, UK

On the 14th December many SatNOGS stations were able to hear an ARISS contact scheduled between Kenilworth School and Sixth form College and the International Space Station. The scheduled astronaut was Serena Aunon-Chancellor KG5TMT. As usual, you can find the list of successful observations and can listen to them via this post on the Libre Space Community page.

 Single Sign On for all Sites, Auth0.

This week members of the team made changes enabling us to have a single user database across our websites. This means users can log in to one site in the ecosystem and authenticate across the rest with just one-click. This now applies to community.libre.space,  network.satnogs.org,  db.satnogs.org, network-dev.satnogs.org, db-dev.satnogs.org, and dashboard-dev.satnogs.org.  As a result, there’s no more need to create individual accounts across those 6 sites, one account now works on all! In conclusion, massive thanks and respect to Auth0 who provide this as a service through their Open Source program.

Rocketlab Electron Curie Launch and Hunting Satellites!

This week Rocketlab successfully launched their Electron ELaNA-19 mission succefully and deployed some satellites to orbit. As with every new launch, the SatNOGS team and community have been trying to hunt the satellites. Currently 5 satellites TLE’s and information have been made available and one satellite has been heard! Additionally, track the development of this over at this post on the Libre Space community page.