It took me about 6 hours of work to get gr-satellites going on my Fedora handheld computer I used for portable LO-90 operations (and hope to use for portable Taurus-1 ops soon as well). I have some Linux familiarity, but, yes you do end up running into wrong versions of dependencies and missing dependencies and having to look up a lot of things to get things working.
Until recently, I would have suggested that Arch or Manjaro make it really easy to run gr-satellites because it's a very simple process to build it from the Arch User Repository. I was able to get it running on an Arch laptop in about 20 minutes. Unfortunately, gr-satellites does not work with GNU Radio 3.8 yet and Arch and Manjaro both ship GNU Radio 3.8 by default, so I can't really suggest that as an "easy solution" any more.
gr-satellites is a great tool and Dani deserves a lot of credit for the work he has done to support so many different satellites. What would be great is for someone to develop a method to make it simple to package for various distributions and a good front-end for using it. That would not be an easy task, but it would go a long way towards making it friendly for less experienced Linux users.
73,
Paul, N8HM
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 10:35 AM Hans BX2ABT via AMSAT-BB < amsat-bb@amsat.org> wrote:
I was going to write a rant about gr-satellites, but then again that would only help me release some of my chagrin and not help met get going, so instead the question in the general interes of this list......
"How can mere mortals start to get going with gr-satellites?"
Been a Linux end-user for 20 years now, so I know my way around, although I can not claim to be an expert. Usually with a quick search online I can find enough info to get going or solve a problem. Even the odd alteration in some source code is not something I am strange to, although a programmer I am not. And then there is GNU Radio.......which almost seems like it comes from another planet. Installing it, no problem with the package manager. I even had success with PyBOMBS, until that wasn't updated anymore. But then, once you get past the basics installation trouble start with OOT modules, dependencies that can't be met, and flow graphs that won't compile. My biggest gripe is that documentation is very minimalist and often tells you how, not why, which doesn't help you in understanding the troubles that you ran into. gr-satellites is a good example of that, because Daniel writes these bare bones flow graphs and then what? There is no view-able output, not many hints on what blocks do, or how to implement them if they are missing.
In short, it seems you first need a four year university course in GNU Radio and Python before you can start using it. That seems silly and a waste of resources, because even I can see the potential of GNU Radio/gr-satellites, especially with this new Taurus-1 sat with Codec-2 transponder around.
So if you please, share your experience in how beginners can set up and use gr-satellites. What are necessary steps? What are pitfalls to avoid? And please also the "why", not only the "what". I guess that apart from me others will also be grateful for this.
On my shack computer I run the latest Kubuntu version with GNU Radio 3.7.13.4 and I guess that is a reasonable starting point because of the popularity of Ubuntu and because it is Debian based. Although since a lot of GNU Radio needs to be compiled by hand is probably won't matter that much.
Reading the above it still does sound a bit like a rant, but it was not written as such, believe me. Cheers for the replies and 73 de Hans
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