Interesting you mention gumstix, it was one of my first ideas for hardware to base something like this on. the nice thing about basing something like a tracker on gumstix is all the software is already written. It should run predict directly or most any other curses based linux app, or for that matter your favorite script interpreter, etc. I also found the lvb tracker 2 shortly after I asked but that seems not to have gone anywhere. It's probably the closest thing to what I'd be looking for but it seems a bit large to lug around as would be a laptop. mostly what I would be looking for is a small unit that I could directly use for frequency control but I'm realizing now that once there you've built that you are only a few transistors away from a full tracker. maybe amsat (or tapr) could do a gumstix refrence platform.
Eric AF6EP
On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 5:06 AM, Ben Jackson [email protected] wrote:
Eric Fort wrote:
I just thought of kind of a neat product for those of us that work sats. Has anyone seen anything similar? I have an ft-817 which has a cat interface and will operate both ssb and fm. Has anyone seen a little box that would adjust the radio frequency for both uplink and downlink while displaying azmuth and elevation data? It seems that it would be handy to have the frequency control take care of itself while providing data as to where I should point the arrow. What do those reading this idea think of it? It would seem to me to be quite useful especially for ssb.
I think it was Mark VandeWettering, KF6KYI, who had a similar idea a few months ago. Last I heard I think he was toying around with the idea of using a Gumstix (http://www.gumstix.com/)devicehttp://www.gumstix.com/%29deviceto be the "black box." - There was a reason he didn't pursue it, but I forget why.
This is a easily extensible system that can be hacked up to control doppler and handle basic radio functions. One could probably have a simple system banged out in an afternoon. As it gets more complicated (external display to control satellite selection, etc) it gets a touch harder to make, but still within the realm of possibility. The good part about Gumstix is that you don't need to get the hardware first to start working on the software, as it's all based on Linux.
I think this idea has a lot of promise, and if I had a transceiver that could computer control, I'd probably start designing it. :)
-- Ben Jackson - N1WBV - New Bedford, MA bbj <at> innismir.net - http://www.innismir.net/