Contribute in-orbit data to a community-run, open-source space project.
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For the still-learning hacker, acquiring radiofrequency skills and experience can be challenging and in some circumstances, rather expensive. Not only do you have to be comfortable using and interpreting different parts of the radio spectrum and different transmission modes, but you’ll also need to be comfortable with antennas, feed lines and ensuring that your computer is able to talk to your radio to transmit and receive signals of interest.
While you’ll typically be able to find amateur radio clubs to help assist you with much of this, the reality is that amateur radio can only teach you so much about this topic before you’ll be moved along looking elsewhere for more information about your topic of interest.
But what if we didn’t have to travel that road? What if a community enabled you to learn about topics like these, in a chill environment that attracted like-minded people who are also interested in learning and sharing information? A community like that would have to be a great place to learn from right?
Then read on because today, we’ll introduce you to one of those communities. Focusing on space, satellites, and space communications, it’s a great place to acquire skills that can help you on your radio hacking pathway. Let’s get started!
Open Source….In Space?!
Part of the Libre Space Foundation, the SATNOGS project aims to coordinate a global group of transmitting and receiving stations to provide open-source data to assist in tracking satellites, space debris and other items of interest. This is just one of such projects coordinated by the foundation,
SATNOGS aims to simplify some of the learning issues faced by projects like this by providing tutorials, resources and a wiki full of information that should help the average beginner get started.
While tackling a ground receive station such as this could still easily be described as a complicated project, this repository of knowledge aims to crowdsource the issue, relying on a skilled and passionate community to help assist with individual issues and provide designs that users can use to keep their receive stations cheap to construct and efficient to use.
From an operator's perspective, consistent reception of signals from space provides much in the way of challenges as typically we’ll need to overcome issues with weak signal strength, marginal antennas and other issues not normally seen with terrestrial signals.
What Is It Anyway?
A simple Linux-based project, Satnogs is a great candidate for running on a Raspberry Pi board and works reasonably well providing you accept a few caveats. Firstly, while you can use the RTL-SDR it’ll come with all the issues you’d expect from a cheap, entry-level receiver. This means that should you be in a city or somewhere that's deemed “noisy” by RF standards, this may end up influencing your station's quality. Typically with radio equipment, you’ll get what you pay for. But if an RTL-SDR is all you have then that will work to start with.
The second thing to consider is that as we mentioned earlier, space communications are usually considered weak signal work. Because of this, antenna and feedline choice is extremely important in getting the best out of the equipment you have. We’ll be looking at simple antenna designs to build along the way to help mitigate this but it may take some patience to find the best setup for your specific location.
So to sum it up, we’ll be covering quite a few fundamental skills to help progress your journey. This means you’ll need to acquire some equipment if you want to follow along. So to participate you’ll need:
- A Raspberry Pi 3 or Better
- SD Card and Pi Peripherals
- An RTL-SDR, HackRF or other radio receiver
- Feedline & Antenna for your receiver.
You’ll also need some basic Linux skills, and a bit of patience as you may have to troubleshoot your system along the way. At the end of it though, you’ll have a project that’ll be a great discussion starter for people that see it.
Let’s get Started
While we won’t be starting the compilation today, there are a few things you’ll be able to do to get organized in advance so you’re ready to go. Firstly, you’ll need a copy of the SATNOGS image to run on your Raspberry Pi. Downloading and flashing this in advance is probably worth considering.
This image is slightly different to what you’ll typically see, as it will come in a compressed file with some other things. So, to flash your SD card you’ll need to uncompress it to unpack the image for flashing.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to ensure the checksum is correct to verify the image's integrity. You can do this in the terminal by going to the directory of the download and running
sha256sum -c sha256sums
Once you’ve completed this, the image is ready to flash onto an SD card. In the next article, we’ll look at configuring and securing the base system and configuring your RTL-SDR to work correctly so you can start detecting your first signals.
Signals. From Space. On a tiny computer with a USB radio receiver. Ain’t science cool?
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