RadioClub EIT - Automated Weather Satellite Ground Station GNURadio

Based on wx-ground-station but now it uses GNURadio for signal processing.

Automated Weather Satelite Ground Station. Automates the reception of weather satellites on Linux using GNURadio. It uses SoapyRemote in order to connect to a remote SDR.

Features:

• Powered by bash, python3, GNURadio, orbit-predictor, wxtoimg, meteor_decoder, SoapyRemote, gr-doppler, gr-satellites and Linux (Ubuntu and Debian tested).
• Works with NOAA 18, NOAA 19, NOAA 15 and METEOR-M 2
• Doppler correction
• Radio reception through SoapyRemote. Allows to multiple users to use the sdr at the same time.
• Upload wav, iq and images to a FTP Server.

Dependencies (Mainly for Linux)

Some linux dependencies

$ sudo apt-get install autoconf
$ sudo apt-get install cmake
$ sudo apt-get install sox
$ sudo apt-get install at
$ sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev
$ sudo apt-get install imagemagick
$ sudo apt-get install telnet

GNURadio

Here a guide of how to install GNURadio

SoapyRemote

Here a guide of how to install SoapyRemote

gr-satellites

Here the docs of how to install gr-satellites

gr-doppler

$ pip install orbit-predictor
$ git clone https://github.com/acien101/gr-doppler.git
$ cd gr-doppler
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ../
$ make
$ sudo make install

Wxtoimg

Link

$ wget https://wxtoimgrestored.xyz/beta/wxtoimg-amd64-2.11.2-beta.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i wxtoimg-amd64-2.11.2-beta.deb

meteor_decoder

Link

$ sudo apt-get fpc
$ git clone https://github.com/artlav/meteor_decoder
$ cd meteor_decoder
$ source build_medet.sh
$ sudo cp medet /usr/bin

orbit_predictor

Link

This project calculate satellite orbit with python3 using orbit-predictor. You can create a virtualenv (recommended) or use python3 with pip3.

sudo apt-get install python3-pip
pip3 install orbit-predictor

Install

Setup environment variables

Complete environment variables on .venv with your station data. Export them or put it on ~/.bashrc for example. Make environment variables efective with source ~/.bashrc

Configure wxtoimg

Write the next variables under ~/.wxtoimgrc. Here is an example .wxtoimgrc.

Latitude: 40.438
Longitude: -3.708
Altitude: 666.0

Configure project

Execute configure.sh. The configure.sh script sets the installation directory in the scripts and schedules a cron job to run the satellite pass scheduler job at midnight every night.

How it works

Powered by bash this program calculate the satellites orbit with python3 and orbit-predictor. It schedules the radio record and the antenna positioning when its passing with schedule_all.sh. On receive_satellite.sh it is executed the GNURadio flowchart for the signal demodulation. Then the signal is decoded with wxtoimg and upload the results to a FTP Server.

Everyday the next pipeline is executed:

• schedule_all.sh Starts the pipeline with the supported satellites. Calculate when the pass is starting and finishing and then it schedule receive_satellite.sh passing the timeout in args.
• receive_satellite.sh Connect to soapyremote server the amount time specified on arg (timeout). The GNURadio flowchart is executed for demodulation and signal process. Then decode_satellite.sh is executed.
• decode_satellite.sh Use wxtoimg to decode NOAA images. Then upload.sh is executed
• upload.sh Upload the results to a FTP Server.