The Skunkworks projects at the GCARC clubhouse encompass about a dozen Raspberry Pi computers along with several Linux virtual machines running on the Skunkworks server. Monitoring all of these systems is a considerable task, so we developed a simple reporting structure that allowed multiple systems to be monitored easily on a Grafana dashboard backed up […]
The clubhouse satellite station has had steady incremental upgrades over the past few years but one factor had remained constant – the antenna and rotator system. The antennas were 1980’s style Cushcraft units that were probably average at the time and gave reasonable but not outstanding performance. Since “outstanding” is a goal of the […]
How We Built the GOES Reception Project Updated 12/1/18 Building our functional GOES 16 receiver was a process of broad web research and cobbling together the experiences of many other successful experimenters. We found lots of individual articles on antenna selection, software, and many other topics, but nothing that really pulled everything together. Hopefully this […]
In preparation for a presentation at the GCARC 2018 Hamfest, here’s a description of the current configuration of the W2MMD satellite station. Hopefully these diagrams will be useful in understanding how everything fits together and is used. Voice Communication Here’s how the voice communication process works. The SDR Console program runs on the PC and […]
SatNOGS is a network of stations that report satellite telemetry to a central database. I’m just getting started in this but here’s what I’ve done so far. The whole SatNOGS project is designed to let amateurs build up a simple satellite station that will report telemetry. The website contains info on antennas, rotators, software and […]
An important aspect of remote control is the ability to point the antennas in the desired direction. Fortunately the PST Rotator program has client/server capability that will let you run a remote copy of the program that will control the rotator at the W2MMD QTH. The Server program is set to run automatically at W2MMD, […]
