Also, as a quick afterthought / alternate idea....(and again, I'm not 100% 'up' on the specifics of interfacing with SatNOGS, other than the SiDS protocol details).....
I wonder if an autmated 'scraper' of some sort could be set up for the Fox / HuskySat-1 / GOLF spacecraft specifically for AMSAT-NA (or other AMSATs of the world).
Simple idea is pull the recordings from SatNOGS....run them through the decoders (maybe FoxTLM, maybe something more custom like what Douglas mentioned he was working on, maybe a variant of that like a GNU Radio version, maybe all three) and then inject the decoded data into the AMSAT TLM network. I feel like some kind of batch process that executes this say every 24 hours, or once a week, or whatever makes sense could be set up to automate the process........
As always there is a lot of 'devil in the detail' there that I didn't mention, and like many things it might be simple to propose, but non-trivial to actually execute (especially on volunteer time).......
Has anyone thought along these lines, or gotten into anything like this? Again simple summary being 'pull from SatNOGS, decode, inject to AMSAT' and do that automatically. If such a system existed....what would the appropriate station ID be (the original station ID? Maybe one station ID that identifies the source of the data as a 'scraper' and then a website keeping track of the stats for the scraper independently that maps back to the original station?....something like 'SatNOGS-Scraper-1' with the station details field populated with a link to the scraper stats page?.....I guess that might get weird if the lat/lon of the scraper is constantly changing to match the original station's position.....also how to keep accurate track of timestamps?). Would prototyping something like this cause heartburn for the TLM database managers (I have visions of half built 'things' flooding the AMSAT TLM server and causing all kinds of problems). Then again, I believe the fox server side is also on github.....so maybe a separate prototyping instance could be set up?
Just another Friday night thought......
-Zach, KJ4QLP
--
Research Associate
Aerospace & Ocean Systems Lab
Ted & Karyn Hume Center for National Security & Technology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Work Phone: 540-231-4174
Cell Phone: 540-808-6305
-----Original Message-----
From: AMSAT-BB
amsat-bb-bounces@amsat.org On Behalf Of Douglas Quagliana via AMSAT-BB
Sent: Friday, July 17, 2020 8:19 PM
To: peter@2m0sql.com; Peter Goodhall (2M0SQL)
peter@magicbug.co.uk
Cc: AMSAT BB
amsat-bb@amsat.org
Subject: [amsat-bb] Leveraging Satnogs recordings ( was: request detailed system diagram for remoting a satellite station)
On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 4:49 PM Peter Goodhall (2M0SQL) via AMSAT-BB <
amsat-bb@amsat.org> wrote:
> Sadly Satnogs isn't suitable for the job being it's for telemetry only,
> also I don't believe it forwards telemetry to AMSAT-NA or AMSAT-UK so radio
> amateurs would be better off with a different solution.
>
Friends,
Satnogs is an incredible and incredibly underutilized resource for AMSAT.
It doesn't automatically forward telemetry, but you can go to the
appropriate Satnogs site, filter on the satellite you want and download the
audio recording of the pass (or passes) that you want. Then
lather-rinse-repeat for as many passes as you want. I would never have been
able to create as many recordings myself at my home QTH as I can get by
downloading them from Satnogs. You can get recordings from anywhere on the
planet where there was a ground station that made a recording. (If you're
fully onboard you could even schedule somebody else to make a recording for
you on a particular date/time in the future. Think about that.)
A while back I downloaded several months worth of old Falconsat-3 audio
recordings so that I could run the recordings through my own 9600 DSP
demodulator and see if I could recover any data from the recordings, and
improve the demodulator as much as possible. I wrote some scripts to
convert and filter each ogg recording and then run them all through my
demodulator. This whole scheme actually worked too well, as I now have
more than enough recordings to keep me busy for a long long time because it
takes my old computer DAYS to process through ALL of those recordings
[footnote 1] and to decide if the latest tweak was an improvement or not.
(Think about your last visit to the eye doctor where you watch the eye
chart through the phoropter [footnote 2] while the eye doctor makes
adjustments to the lenses and asks you if this one is now "Better? Or
worse?" -- well, this is almost the same thing but it takes three days to
find out the answer for each change. But, I digress...)
So far, of the recordings that I downloaded, the most extreme pass is
https://network.satnogs.org/observations/180707/
the audio recording is eighteen megabytes and is online at
https://ia902808.us.archive.org/7/items/satnogs-observation-180707/satnogs_1...
The satnogs webpage for this pass shows 644 valid 9600 baud AX.25 packets
this recording so you know it is a good pass with plenty of frames in it.
By throwing everything I can think of at this recording, I can now get over
1000 good frames out of it. Oh, and, hey, if anybody else tries this
recording against their own demodulator, then whatever results you get
please send them to me so I can look for any valid frames I am missing.
And the advantage of the satnogs recordings is that you can keep tweaking
your software iteratively by running the recordings against the "new"
demodulator again, and again, and again, and compare the results. You
could never achieve this or iterate this many times with live satellite
passes.
73,
Douglas KA2UPW/5
[1] If the whole process doesn't get interrupted... Actually, this says
more about my old slow computer than it says about the speed of the
demodulator.
[2] If you get your eyes checked then you know this device. You just might
not know the name for it. Consider "phoropter" to be today's new
word-of-the-day. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoropter
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