The Gloucester County Amateur Radio Club proudly operates a SatNOGS (Satellite Networked Open Ground Station) receiver as part of the global Libre Space Foundation network. SatNOGS is an open-source, crowdsourced system that enables distributed ground stations to automatically track and receive telemetry, data, and signals from hundreds of amateur radio satellites orbiting Earth.

Our station, known as W2MMD GCARC Clubhouse (Station 223), is integrated with the club’s high-performance satellite antenna array: a 22-element cross-Yagi on 2 meters (144 MHz) and a 42-element cross-Yagi on 70 cm (432 MHz), mounted on an azimuth-elevation rotator. This setup provides exceptional gain and sensitivity—far superior to many other East Coast stations—allowing reliable reception of weak signals from low-Earth-orbit satellites.

Thanks to these powerful antennas, our station consistently achieves high-quality observations, making it a popular choice on the SatNOGS network. Users worldwide schedule passes on Station 223 to capture telemetry from a wide variety of satellites, including CubeSats, educational payloads, and weather/imaging birds that transmit on amateur frequencies.

Contribution to Satellite Science

By participating in SatNOGS, GCARC directly supports the global amateur satellite community and space research:

• Collecting and publicly archiving telemetry data for satellite operators, universities, and organizations to monitor spacecraft health, orbits, and experiments
• Enabling decoding of scientific payloads, such as environmental sensors, radiation measurements, or technology demonstrations
• Providing reliable data during launch campaigns and for long-term orbit tracking
• Promoting open-source collaboration and education in space communications

View our station’s status, past observations, and schedule future passes at the official page: SatNOGS Station 223 – W2MMD GCARC Clubhouse.

This resource exemplifies GCARC’s commitment to advanced VHF/UHF operations and citizen science in space!