Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Planet Frequency and Tracking Integration with GNURadio

[Michael Piscopo]

It was definitely part of the fundamentals I wanted to finish up before getting out there next week.  A long-term goal is being able to point an antenna at lunar or Mars sources (obviously Lunar being a little more achievable from a "back yard" antenna).  Skytrack now gives me the ability to control a rotor system to point and track those targets just like we can do with gpredict for satellites.  Then the basics of using gnuradio for demod/decoding once you have reception doesn't look any different than what we're used to today with satellites.  The antenna pointing is now just automated.

It would be cool if the ATA took hamlib "P <lat> <long>\n" commands for pointing, but somehow I think it's a bit more sophisticated than that :)

On Thu, May 9, 2019 at 4:17 PM Ben Hilburn <address@hidden> wrote:

Hey Mike -

Whoa, this is cool - thanks so much for sharing it!

It sounds like you wrote it principally to facilitate something of a soft hand-off between two receivers positioned around an occlusion, but do you have thoughts on the utility of expanding it past receiver diversity? Thinking through how it could be used or expanded next week for the hackfest at the ATA =)

Cheers,

Ben

On Thu, May 9, 2019 at 12:11 PM Michael Piscopo <address@hidden> wrote:

HI everyone, another new tracking module that now integrates with GNURadio I just released here:

https://github.com/ghostop14/skytrack

Skytrack takes signal tracking out past gpredict with earth-based satellites and allows tracking (doppler frequency shifts and azimuth and elevation) out to solar system bodies (thanks to the python skyfield library).  Use case: pointing an antenna at the Moon or Mars.  It talks seamlessly to the new gr-gpredict-doppler GNURadio modules I pushed last week (https://github.com/ghostop14/gr-gpredict-doppler.git) to bring live doppler frequency updates into GNURadio.

It's a little "rough" as a python script, and the skyfield library went through some updates late last year, but let me know if anyone has any issues.

One more set of new modules I'm working on that I'll try to push hopefully before summer will pull a bigger picture together with a GNURadio block that can monitor inbound power and provide state output, and an input selector that integrates with it to automatically switch receivers based on signal strength to select the best receiver/antenna for a particular frequency. 

Ultimate goal/Big Picture: Multiple receivers monitoring the same space-based signal that can automatically select the best input based on power, and only record to file (using the new gr-filerepeater enhancements) when the signal should be (and is) present.  All this because I'm lazy and don't want to have to keep moving my antenna with North/South passes or have to keep running to my computer with each pass to start/stop recording a pass!

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