SatNOGS stands officially for “Satellite Networked Open Ground Station” which I take to mean “Open Networked Satellite Ground Station”, but ONSGS is not a very user friendly acronym…
The SatNOGS web site satnogs.org has a wealth of information, but the page I found most useful is the wiki: wiki.satnogs.org. I’ll quote one image that gives a overall view of the whole setup:
Since my primary purpose of the whole exercise is to familiarize myself with SatNOGS rather than building an actual grundstation and since I have have no antennas at the moment I’ll restrict myself to work with the two boxes ‘SatNOGS client’ and ‘Signal Reception’ (marked in red in the picture).
I have at hand a radio (an ICOM 821) and several options for decoders: an old DSP12 TNC, a SignaLink soundcard and a standard coundcard in the my workstation. Alternatively I might acquire a SDR unit. Doing this will probably teach me a lot more about signal processing than working with the older ‘classical’ ICOM 821.
The hardware for the SatNOGS client could be either my workstation or a Raspberry Pi 3.
I consider setting up the SatNOGS client as a piece of cake (how difficult can installing a piece of software be?) so the next step will be to get the 821 back into the shack and connect the above mentioned decoders to it. Perhaps I should rig something up as a receive antenna.
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