No no no no no no no no no, that is exactly not what I meant and want at all. There should be more "somebodies" who know and understand this, not one or two who solve problems for the majority of mere mortals. Processing RF with computers is already a big thing and it's becoming even bigger. Nobody will understand every aspect of it, but everybody should at least understand enough to solve or mitigate problems. Amateur radio is as much about enjoying communication as it is about enriching your knowledge. The more knowledge there is the easier it becomes to solve problems. Hope you can appreciate my point of view. Cheers, Hans.

On 09/16/2019 11:01 PM, Doug Phelps wrote:

Suggestion. how about if somebody who knows what they're doing set it up on a raspberry pi and then others can just copy the SD card and be off.

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-------- Original Message -------- On Sep 16, 2019, 9:52 AM, Paul Stoetzer via AMSAT-BB < [email protected]> wrote:

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 <
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> 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 <http://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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_______________________________________________
Sent via [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>. AMSAT-NA
makes this open forum available
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are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the official
views of AMSAT-NA.
Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite
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