How to tame gr-satellites?
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
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
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed 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 program! Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
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.
Sent from ProtonMail mobile
-------- Original Message -------- On Sep 16, 2019, 9:52 AM, Paul Stoetzer via AMSAT-BB 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 < 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
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed 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 program! Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed 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 program! Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
It sounds like the perfect application to containerize. Forking the available gnuradio-3.8 docker to include gr-satellites should be doable.
https://gitlab.com/theseus-cores/theseus-docker/tree/master/gnuradio-3.8
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 8:12 AM Doug Phelps via AMSAT-BB amsat-bb@amsat.org 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.
Sent from ProtonMail mobile
-------- Original Message -------- On Sep 16, 2019, 9:52 AM, Paul Stoetzer via AMSAT-BB 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 < 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
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership.
Opinions
expressed 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
program!
Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership.
Opinions expressed
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
program!
Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed 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 program! Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
That is a good interim step, but note that gr-satellites does not currently operate with GNU Radio 3.8.
73,
Paul, N8HM
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 1:05 PM Alex Free - N7AGF via AMSAT-BB < amsat-bb@amsat.org> wrote:
It sounds like the perfect application to containerize. Forking the available gnuradio-3.8 docker to include gr-satellites should be doable.
https://gitlab.com/theseus-cores/theseus-docker/tree/master/gnuradio-3.8
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 8:12 AM Doug Phelps via AMSAT-BB < amsat-bb@amsat.org> 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.
Sent from ProtonMail mobile
-------- Original Message -------- On Sep 16, 2019, 9:52 AM, Paul Stoetzer via AMSAT-BB 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 < 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
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership.
Opinions
expressed 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
program!
Subscription settings:
https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership.
Opinions expressed
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
program!
Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership.
Opinions
expressed 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
program!
Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed 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 program! Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
Even better. There appear to be several more "mature" docker gnuradio 3.7.x containers floating around from a couple years ago. I'll get into it when I find a spare moment.
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 10:09 AM Paul Stoetzer n8hm@arrl.net wrote:
That is a good interim step, but note that gr-satellites does not currently operate with GNU Radio 3.8.
73,
Paul, N8HM
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 1:05 PM Alex Free - N7AGF via AMSAT-BB < amsat-bb@amsat.org> wrote:
It sounds like the perfect application to containerize. Forking the available gnuradio-3.8 docker to include gr-satellites should be doable.
https://gitlab.com/theseus-cores/theseus-docker/tree/master/gnuradio-3.8
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 8:12 AM Doug Phelps via AMSAT-BB < amsat-bb@amsat.org> 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.
Sent from ProtonMail mobile
-------- Original Message -------- On Sep 16, 2019, 9:52 AM, Paul Stoetzer via AMSAT-BB 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 < 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
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum
available
to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership.
Opinions
expressed 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
program!
Subscription settings:
https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership.
Opinions expressed
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
program!
Subscription settings:
https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership.
Opinions
expressed 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
program!
Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed 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 program! Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
Hi all,
Just to join the discussion. To be honest, these are problems that are already identified. There are many Amateurs who don't want or cannot install Linux and GNU Radio to run gr-satellites. There are also some people interested in using gr-satellites for education or outreach, but they have limited abilities with computers, so setting up GNU Radio and everything else can be really complicated.
This is not a problem that affects gr-satellites in particular. I think it can be applied to any other GNU Radio out-of-tree module as well.
There are several ideas that would make using gr-satellites easier, some of which have already been mentioned: windows builds, live CD, raspberry pi image, docker container.
Unfortunately currently I simply don't have the time to get into any of these, but if anyone wants to collaborate I may be able to give some support.
Just keep in mind that gr-satellites is updated often, as new satellites get launched, so any form of release should be updated as often as the Github repository in order to be useful (since often people are especially interested in decoding that particular satellite which just launched a few days ago).
In any case, I'm open for discussions about what you would consider helpful, since getting the software up and running is only part of the problem. As Paul mentioned, you also need to interface with your SDR hardware, and essentially configure all these tools that surround gr-satellites correctly according to your use case.
By the way, support for GNU Radio 3.8 in gr-satellites will be hopefully done next week.
73,
Dani.
El 16/9/19 a las 19:24, Alex Free - N7AGF via AMSAT-BB escribió:
Even better. There appear to be several more "mature" docker gnuradio 3.7.x containers floating around from a couple years ago. I'll get into it when I find a spare moment.
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 10:09 AM Paul Stoetzer n8hm@arrl.net wrote:
That is a good interim step, but note that gr-satellites does not currently operate with GNU Radio 3.8.
73,
Paul, N8HM
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 1:05 PM Alex Free - N7AGF via AMSAT-BB < amsat-bb@amsat.org> wrote:
It sounds like the perfect application to containerize. Forking the available gnuradio-3.8 docker to include gr-satellites should be doable.
https://gitlab.com/theseus-cores/theseus-docker/tree/master/gnuradio-3.8
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 8:12 AM Doug Phelps via AMSAT-BB < amsat-bb@amsat.org> 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.
Sent from ProtonMail mobile
-------- Original Message -------- On Sep 16, 2019, 9:52 AM, Paul Stoetzer via AMSAT-BB 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 < 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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Hello Daniel and others on the list.
Thanks for the reply. I didn't know you were reading this list.
But I feel you are overthinking this a bit. If setting up GNU Radio/gr-satellites can be really complicated then ask yourself why this is. And is GNU Radio/gr-satellites any good if it is? You spend a lot of time and effort in creating and maintaining gr-satellites, but only a handful people in the world use it. If I were you I would be disappointed that the effort you put into something only serves so few, while it could bring joy to many.
In my 20 years with Linux I hardly ever needed to ask help on mailing lists or forums, because with a good web search and some proper reading there were always answers around, if I couldn't already have found them in HOWTOs or FAQs. Takes a few minutes, and a few tries, but then I'm usually good to go. Only in extreme cases do I resort to asking around.
I think the major problem with GNU Radio/gr-satellites is good, well written documentation on how to get going and on trouble shooting. Let me give you an example....
On the gr-satellites github page it says you need to fulfill some dependency requirements before compiling gr-satellites.
[quote]
* Phil Karn's KA9Q |libfec|. A fork that builds in modern linux systems can be found here https://github.com/daniestevez/libfec. * construct https://construct.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, at least version 2.9. * requests https://pypi.org/project/requests/2.7.0/. * swig http://www.swig.org/
[/unquote]
The above is very ambiguous. It indicates "why" but not "how".
1) Do I have to compile and install all this myself, or can they be found in my distro's repositories?
2) Are they all installed with ./configure, make, make install or are there other methods?
The answers are (I think, but not sure):
1) You do have to compile and install the first three, but you can use swig from you distro's repository.
2) libfec is compiled with ./configure, make, make install. Construct and requests can be found in distro's repositories but are probably older versions and they are called (on Debian systems) python-construct and python requests. So the best way to go is to install by using pip.
Because of this ambiguous information it took me a good part of this morning to figure out. I'm not easily frustrated, but a bit vexed that I needed to spend so much time on something that could have been easy if the information on how to do it was more forthcoming.
Another example. I've got GNU Radio and gr-satellites installed and I figured out where the .grc files were hiding. I open one and am greeted with loads of red because of missing blocks. There is also another warning that says "Port is not connected". I've been reading and searching the web for two hours already, but still haven't got a clue about the "why" and certainly not about "how" to proceed now. I don't mind trouble shooting, but then I need at least some hints to get started. Right now I haven't.
Third example: last year I did have a working GNURadio/gr-satellites setup with pyBOMBS (before that broke). I did see some telemetry rolling down a terminal window, but the last block in every flow graph is always this SatNogs Telemetry Forwarder. Tried to figure out if it was actually forwarding, where it ended up, where I could see my forwarded data. Couldn't figure it out, couldn't find any documentation or examples, so I gave up.
I wrote this before: GNU Radio is not a mainstream piece of software, so support comes from a small community of people who are deeply into this sort of thing (and who often can't really imagine the needs of ordinary users). gr-satellites is even more of a project that caters to only a very few. With little documentation that can help a beginner many will be discouraged in trying, which in turn will not increase the community of users. A vicious cycle, in other words.
I don't believe in "band-aid" methods like dockers, live CDs, etc. From my own experience I know that they will also create problems and obstacles, and discourage the lesser inclined to go on with Linux/GNU Radio. You mention gr-satellites used in education and outreach. For them it dockers and live-CDs could be useful, but then again, they would probably also ask for the help of an radio amateur. If that amateur knows his stuff then with a regular distro, well installed software and problem solving skills there would be no need for dockers, etc.
With this new Taurus-1 bird up it seems a good time to get some more hams using gr-satellites. People who already have working setups, please share whatever info you have, so everyone can benefit.
Cheers and 73 de Hans (BX2ABT)
P.S. Daniel, I hope I have not sounded too harsh in the above. Without your work we wouldn't have much telemetry decoding on Linux at all, so I'm not going to end without thanking you for writing gr-satellites. Cheers.
On 09/17/2019 11:18 AM, Daniel Estévez via AMSAT-BB wrote:
Hi all,
Just to join the discussion. To be honest, these are problems that are already identified. There are many Amateurs who don't want or cannot install Linux and GNU Radio to run gr-satellites. There are also some people interested in using gr-satellites for education or outreach, but they have limited abilities with computers, so setting up GNU Radio and everything else can be really complicated.
This is not a problem that affects gr-satellites in particular. I think it can be applied to any other GNU Radio out-of-tree module as well.
There are several ideas that would make using gr-satellites easier, some of which have already been mentioned: windows builds, live CD, raspberry pi image, docker container.
Unfortunately currently I simply don't have the time to get into any of these, but if anyone wants to collaborate I may be able to give some support.
Just keep in mind that gr-satellites is updated often, as new satellites get launched, so any form of release should be updated as often as the Github repository in order to be useful (since often people are especially interested in decoding that particular satellite which just launched a few days ago).
In any case, I'm open for discussions about what you would consider helpful, since getting the software up and running is only part of the problem. As Paul mentioned, you also need to interface with your SDR hardware, and essentially configure all these tools that surround gr-satellites correctly according to your use case.
By the way, support for GNU Radio 3.8 in gr-satellites will be hopefully done next week.
73,
Dani.
El 16/9/19 a las 19:24, Alex Free - N7AGF via AMSAT-BB escribió:
Even better. There appear to be several more "mature" docker gnuradio 3.7.x containers floating around from a couple years ago. I'll get into it when I find a spare moment.
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 10:09 AM Paul Stoetzer n8hm@arrl.net wrote:
That is a good interim step, but note that gr-satellites does not currently operate with GNU Radio 3.8.
73,
Paul, N8HM
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 1:05 PM Alex Free - N7AGF via AMSAT-BB < amsat-bb@amsat.org> wrote:
It sounds like the perfect application to containerize. Forking the available gnuradio-3.8 docker to include gr-satellites should be doable.
https://gitlab.com/theseus-cores/theseus-docker/tree/master/gnuradio-3.8
On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 8:12 AM Doug Phelps via AMSAT-BB < amsat-bb@amsat.org> 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.
Sent from ProtonMail mobile
-------- Original Message -------- On Sep 16, 2019, 9:52 AM, Paul Stoetzer via AMSAT-BB 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 < 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 > > > _______________________________________________ > Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum
available
> to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership.
Opinions
> expressed > 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
program!
> Subscription settings:
https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb
Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership.
Opinions expressed
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of
AMSAT-NA.
Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite
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Hi Hans,
I'm taking your email as constructive criticism, so I'll discuss on ideas about how to improve the documentation or procedures rather than on how many people use GNU Radio or gr-satellites and whether this is satisfactory.
One problem is that some things that might seem so obvious when you are really involved with some software/framework are not obvious at all for newcomers. With these things, many times a few extra sentences in the documentation can help a lot. And usually the best advice comes from newcomers: the pitfalls they found and how to help others avoid them.
This said, answers to particular points below.
El 17/9/19 a las 8:58, Hans BX2ABT escribió:
On the gr-satellites github page it says you need to fulfill some dependency requirements before compiling gr-satellites.
[quote]
- Phil Karn's KA9Q |libfec|. A fork that builds in modern linux systems can be found here https://github.com/daniestevez/libfec.
- construct https://construct.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, at least version 2.9.
- requests https://pypi.org/project/requests/2.7.0/.
- swig http://www.swig.org/
[/unquote]
The above is very ambiguous. It indicates "why" but not "how".
- Do I have to compile and install all this myself, or can they be
found in my distro's repositories?
- Are they all installed with ./configure, make, make install or are
there other methods?
The answers are (I think, but not sure):
- You do have to compile and install the first three, but you can use
swig from you distro's repository.
- libfec is compiled with ./configure, make, make install. Construct
and requests can be found in distro's repositories but are probably older versions and they are called (on Debian systems) python-construct and python requests. So the best way to go is to install by using pip.
The problem with this is that it depends a lot on what particular distribution or setup you are using. Maybe your distribution ships a recent version of GNU Radio and you installed that. Maybe you compiled it from source. Maybe swig came as a dependency as you installed GNU Radio. Maybe not and you need to install it explicitly. Maybe your distribution has packaged recent enough versions of construct or requests. Maybe not and you are better off using pip. Or maybe you Python installation is based on Anaconda, so you install all Python packages using conda. Or maybe you used PyBOMBs to install GNU Radio and gr-satellites instead of your distributions' package manager. Or maybe you are using Arch, which has an AUR package for gr-satellites.
Certainly it is hard (especially for a single person) to give precise instructions covering all these use cases.
However, I see a couple possible solutions:
1) Identify the case that typically should work for most people. This is more or less what you said: install GNU Radio, SWIG and requests through your package's manager, install construct through pip, install libfec from source, and install gr-satellites from source.
I think this would be the recommended steps in Ubuntu 19.04, which seems the most popular distribution, and is also what I'm doing on Gentoo.
2) Try to get help from the community to describe precise installation steps for different distributions and/or setups. Actually Github supports Wiki pages for the repositories. I'm not currently using this feature, but perhaps it could be useful to open up an "Installation" wiki page where people can detail installation steps for different distros.
I think option 2) might be more desirable, but I'm not sure if I could get enough people to engage and maintain good quality and up to date instructions (this is important as new distros get released).
Option 1) might be much easier to set up and could be accomplished by adding an "Installation of dependencies" section to the README.
I agree that having some installation instructions that you can simply copy & paste onto the command line can save time and effort even to very experienced people.
Another example. I've got GNU Radio and gr-satellites installed and I figured out where the .grc files were hiding. I open one and am greeted with loads of red because of missing blocks. There is also another warning that says "Port is not connected". I've been reading and searching the web for two hours already, but still haven't got a clue about the "why" and certainly not about "how" to proceed now. I don't mind trouble shooting, but then I need at least some hints to get started. Right now I haven't.
This might be because you haven't installed the hierarchical flowgraphs. It is described in the README. Ideally I would like this step to run automatically from CMake, but I haven't been able to find how. Therefore, it needs to be run manually. Maybe with the updated CMake infrastructure in GNU Radio 3.8 it will be easier to do this automatically.
If you have indeed installed the hierarchical flowgraphs and are getting missing blocks, please detail which blocks are missing.
Third example: last year I did have a working GNURadio/gr-satellites setup with pyBOMBS (before that broke). I did see some telemetry rolling down a terminal window, but the last block in every flow graph is always this SatNogs Telemetry Forwarder. Tried to figure out if it was actually forwarding, where it ended up, where I could see my forwarded data. Couldn't figure it out, couldn't find any documentation or examples, so I gave up.
There is also either a telemetry parser block or a debug message block as last block (in parallel with the telemetry forwarder) which is in charge of printing the telemetry values that appear in the terminal window.
Regarding the SatNOGS telemetry forwarder, this is documented in the README, in a section called "Submitting telemetry to SatNOGS", which I think already answers some of your questions.
As you'll see, you need to specify your callsign and location to submit telemetry to SatNOGS, so unless you did set these, then the forwarder was simply doing nothing.
The questions that occur to me that are not explicitly treated in the documentation are:
* How do I know if this is working? It happens that the forwarder will print nothing when a frame is submitted correctly. However, if there is some error, the forwarder will print an error message. I figured out this was the most useful approach, as it would be too verbose to print out a message anytime that a packet is submitted successfully. However, as this design choice is not obvious, perhaps a sentence should be added to the documentation.
* Where do the frames end up in SatNOGS DB. Of course the answer is that you need to got to SatNOGS DB webpage, select the particular satellite, scroll to the bottom, and there you have some links to download the frames in the database (which in my experience might or might not work depending on how much data you request). However, I think that this functionality should be documented from SatNOGS side rather than from the gr-satellites side. Somehow, in the 2Submitting telemetry to SatNOGS" section of the README it is assumed that you know what SatNOGS DB is.
So to wrap up:
It is possible to create a Wiki page on Github were people can contribute with documentation to help others (installation instructions, setup descriptions, interfacing with other software). I can set this up. Would be people interested in contributing?
Regarding the README, I'm open for pull requests with improvements or with concreted ideas about how to improve it.
73,
Dani.
Hello Daniel,
Thanks for taking my writing in stride and you are right: being deeply involved in something might narrow one's vision, especially compared to people not in the know. But from your reaction I am confident we're getting ahead in making gr-satellites even more accessible.
Your suggestion for a Wiki on GitHub is a good one and I will certainly be a contributor. I am not sure if this Wiki will need an administrator or moderator, but if it does then I'm willing to help out there, too, if no better candidate is available.
As for the README, I'm not very familiar with GitHub and how to create a pull request, but I'll look into it tonight. As you can tell from my previous post I do have some ideas on how to improve it.
I'll leave it at that for now. 73 de Hans
On 09/18/2019 07:15 AM, Daniel Estévez wrote:
Hi Hans,
I'm taking your email as constructive criticism, so I'll discuss on ideas about how to improve the documentation or procedures rather than on how many people use GNU Radio or gr-satellites and whether this is satisfactory.
One problem is that some things that might seem so obvious when you are really involved with some software/framework are not obvious at all for newcomers. With these things, many times a few extra sentences in the documentation can help a lot. And usually the best advice comes from newcomers: the pitfalls they found and how to help others avoid them.
This said, answers to particular points below.
El 17/9/19 a las 8:58, Hans BX2ABT escribió:
On the gr-satellites github page it says you need to fulfill some dependency requirements before compiling gr-satellites.
[quote]
- Phil Karn's KA9Q |libfec|. A fork that builds in modern linux systems can be found here https://github.com/daniestevez/libfec.
- construct https://construct.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, at least version 2.9.
- requests https://pypi.org/project/requests/2.7.0/.
- swig http://www.swig.org/
[/unquote]
The above is very ambiguous. It indicates "why" but not "how".
- Do I have to compile and install all this myself, or can they be
found in my distro's repositories?
- Are they all installed with ./configure, make, make install or are
there other methods?
The answers are (I think, but not sure):
- You do have to compile and install the first three, but you can use
swig from you distro's repository.
- libfec is compiled with ./configure, make, make install. Construct
and requests can be found in distro's repositories but are probably older versions and they are called (on Debian systems) python-construct and python requests. So the best way to go is to install by using pip.
The problem with this is that it depends a lot on what particular distribution or setup you are using. Maybe your distribution ships a recent version of GNU Radio and you installed that. Maybe you compiled it from source. Maybe swig came as a dependency as you installed GNU Radio. Maybe not and you need to install it explicitly. Maybe your distribution has packaged recent enough versions of construct or requests. Maybe not and you are better off using pip. Or maybe you Python installation is based on Anaconda, so you install all Python packages using conda. Or maybe you used PyBOMBs to install GNU Radio and gr-satellites instead of your distributions' package manager. Or maybe you are using Arch, which has an AUR package for gr-satellites.
Certainly it is hard (especially for a single person) to give precise instructions covering all these use cases.
However, I see a couple possible solutions:
- Identify the case that typically should work for most people. This is
more or less what you said: install GNU Radio, SWIG and requests through your package's manager, install construct through pip, install libfec from source, and install gr-satellites from source.
I think this would be the recommended steps in Ubuntu 19.04, which seems the most popular distribution, and is also what I'm doing on Gentoo.
- Try to get help from the community to describe precise installation
steps for different distributions and/or setups. Actually Github supports Wiki pages for the repositories. I'm not currently using this feature, but perhaps it could be useful to open up an "Installation" wiki page where people can detail installation steps for different distros.
I think option 2) might be more desirable, but I'm not sure if I could get enough people to engage and maintain good quality and up to date instructions (this is important as new distros get released).
Option 1) might be much easier to set up and could be accomplished by adding an "Installation of dependencies" section to the README.
I agree that having some installation instructions that you can simply copy & paste onto the command line can save time and effort even to very experienced people.
Another example. I've got GNU Radio and gr-satellites installed and I figured out where the .grc files were hiding. I open one and am greeted with loads of red because of missing blocks. There is also another warning that says "Port is not connected". I've been reading and searching the web for two hours already, but still haven't got a clue about the "why" and certainly not about "how" to proceed now. I don't mind trouble shooting, but then I need at least some hints to get started. Right now I haven't.
This might be because you haven't installed the hierarchical flowgraphs. It is described in the README. Ideally I would like this step to run automatically from CMake, but I haven't been able to find how. Therefore, it needs to be run manually. Maybe with the updated CMake infrastructure in GNU Radio 3.8 it will be easier to do this automatically.
If you have indeed installed the hierarchical flowgraphs and are getting missing blocks, please detail which blocks are missing.
Third example: last year I did have a working GNURadio/gr-satellites setup with pyBOMBS (before that broke). I did see some telemetry rolling down a terminal window, but the last block in every flow graph is always this SatNogs Telemetry Forwarder. Tried to figure out if it was actually forwarding, where it ended up, where I could see my forwarded data. Couldn't figure it out, couldn't find any documentation or examples, so I gave up.
There is also either a telemetry parser block or a debug message block as last block (in parallel with the telemetry forwarder) which is in charge of printing the telemetry values that appear in the terminal window.
Regarding the SatNOGS telemetry forwarder, this is documented in the README, in a section called "Submitting telemetry to SatNOGS", which I think already answers some of your questions.
As you'll see, you need to specify your callsign and location to submit telemetry to SatNOGS, so unless you did set these, then the forwarder was simply doing nothing.
The questions that occur to me that are not explicitly treated in the documentation are:
- How do I know if this is working? It happens that the forwarder will
print nothing when a frame is submitted correctly. However, if there is some error, the forwarder will print an error message. I figured out this was the most useful approach, as it would be too verbose to print out a message anytime that a packet is submitted successfully. However, as this design choice is not obvious, perhaps a sentence should be added to the documentation.
- Where do the frames end up in SatNOGS DB. Of course the answer is that
you need to got to SatNOGS DB webpage, select the particular satellite, scroll to the bottom, and there you have some links to download the frames in the database (which in my experience might or might not work depending on how much data you request). However, I think that this functionality should be documented from SatNOGS side rather than from the gr-satellites side. Somehow, in the 2Submitting telemetry to SatNOGS" section of the README it is assumed that you know what SatNOGS DB is.
So to wrap up:
It is possible to create a Wiki page on Github were people can contribute with documentation to help others (installation instructions, setup descriptions, interfacing with other software). I can set this up. Would be people interested in contributing?
Regarding the README, I'm open for pull requests with improvements or with concreted ideas about how to improve it.
73,
Dani.
participants (5)
-
Alex Free - N7AGF -
Daniel Estévez -
Doug Phelps -
Hans BX2ABT -
Paul Stoetzer