SatNOGS Blog

What is SatNOGS? I know that GNU Radio is a software defined radio toolkit. From the diagrams and "Sat" part of the name it seems like SatNOGS is some kind of thing for keeping antennas pointed at satellites. But it's hard to figure much else out about what this is and why this is relevant to anyone not already part of the community (in which case they would likely already see it by following the forum).

The link at the upper right doesn't help, since that just brings you to the front page of the forum. I have to Google for "SatNOGS" (or guess that I can delete "community" from the URL) to get to the landing page: https://satnogs.org/ which describes: "DIY Satellite Ground Station and Network - SatNOGS is an open source ground station and network, optimized for modularity, built from readily available and affordable tools and resources."

This helps a little bit, but it still doesn't describe what it does and why. Does this just let you track satellites? Read data being transmitted by them? What types of satellites? What kind of data?

Posting this to HN feels a bit like posting a link to a discussion about a refactoring of the internals of the block device driver in MINIX on its mailing list. Maybe technically interesting to a few people who have context, but a bit puzzling for a wider audience, and with very little context.

I don't mean this to be negative, I'm mostly trying to give constructive criticism that it can help to provide a bit more context, and links to make…

> First of all, could you give some concrete examples of the kinds of data people using this would be handling?

Planet operates imagery satellites, and as far as I know that's the bulk of commercial data _produced_ in orbit that needs to be downlinked. Other commercial services that
could include radar data (ICEYE, Capella), ship/plane monitoring (Spire, Iridium NEXT), or high-latency low-bandwidth data (think devices out in the field, on vehicles, with relatively light telemetry and/or control needs). Telecom is usually "bent pipe" (think dumb repeaters) and not any kind of store and forward setup that would use this.

In the future, I could see some broadening of the field with more tech demo/development that needs dedicated hardware, and the possibility of commercial experiments run in an automated orbiting lab downlinking data.

Of course, all of those also need what's called TT&C (Telemetry, Tracking, and Control) links, which I've nearly always seen on a separate physical radio. That tends to be a less demanding link, and more likely to be able to make use of something like this IMO.

> Could you give some ballpark numbers and breakdown of the costs involved?

Unfortunately, I very much cannot do more than point at what's already public; that's one thing Planet is very tight-lipped about. The idea that one spends about as much on launch as on the hardware they launch seems about right, you can go see what Rocketlab[1] and SpaceX[2] quote as prices. I'm sure you can…

Another amateur radio sidenote for the day[0], SATNOGS[1] performs a similar task by tracking and recording satellite passes of LEO cubesats with amateur radio telemetry and communication payloads via a network of DIY ground stations. Anyone can see a history of any pass of a tracked satellite over a particular station including a RF spectrum waterfall, audio capture, and telemetry output if supported.

The SATNOGS receivers, usually a low-cost RTLSDR, cover a much wider spectrum than just amateur bands (which prohibits commercial use of it's spectrum), so I wouldn't be surprised if non-amateur entities are eyeing the service, or if SATNOGS organization is thinking about going commerical (although there's already competition in this field besides AWS Ground Station).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18543454

[1] https://satnogs.org/

We often share projects on Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com). Some ideas:

- Work with https://satnogs.org/ to build an open source ground station network.
- Check out https://www.opensourcesatellite.org/
- KubOS is an open source flight OS in Linux & Rust.
- work on tracking bolides with AMS (https://www.amsmeteors.org)

What are your skills? There's tons of work to be done using Earth observation data and space data for interesting things.