[Ground-station] Open Source CubeSat Workshop notes from Hugh

[Hugh Brown]

KENT BRITAIN via Ground-Station wrote:
> Interesting Report
> Can Hugh be more specific about what kind of antennas he has in mind?
> I didn't see a way of contacting him directly.

Hi Kent -- I'm on the list (and neglected to add my email address to
the notes).

I think they bit you're referring to is:

> - As designs for antenna progress, it will be worth talking to SatNOGS
>   folks about designs/instructions for easy-to-build Phase 4 antenna
>   that can be put into SatNOGS ground stations
>   - One interesting possibility might be to market Phase4 radio
>     designs (or better yet, cubesat parts as Bruce has suggested) +
>     SatNOGS ground station as a standard open source ground station
>     for satellite telemetry:
>     - visualization via SatNOGS DB
>     - telemetry/instrument data via DVB
>     - perhaps with built-in amateur radio functionality (whatever the
>       next generation of current AMSAT FM repeaters might look like)
>       in order to get amateur radio community interested as well
>       (though this may need to be balanced against worries of amateur
>       radio folks appearing as scribes/assistants)
>     - Note: C&C not part of SatNOGS; they've got some stubs for the
>       functionality, but I'm not sure if this is a priority for them

Looking back, I realize I wasn't terribly clear here.  What I had in
mind was that as design/build of the Phase 4 receiver (and antenna)
progresses, it might be worth looking for ways to make it easy to
integrate it into the SatNOGS project.  I was thinking about the
discussions I seem to recall about both receiver and antenna design on
the mailing list and on Slack -- thus, not a particular antenna but
whatever the final (or final-ish) design converges on.

Since SatNOGS (I think) needs mainly a GNU Radio-compatible SDR, and
is antenna-agnostic, I don't think this should present much of a
problem; my idea was more about presenting SatNOGS + Phase4 as an
"all-in-one" solution for cubesat ground stations run by the
operators, as well as for stations run by interested third parties
(the way SatNOGS can be used by non-operators today to collect
telemetry).

As I'm still learning about Phase 4 (and amateur radio in general for
that matter), it's entirely possible I've misunderstood some of this,
underestimated difficulties, etc...any confusion is likely to be
mine. :-)

I hope that helps, but let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Hugh

-- 
Hugh Brown
http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com