Omnidirectional Station How To
From SatNOGS Wiki
This How-To is exactly how I set up the station at home.
Contents
Hardware Required
- Raspberry Pi
- Power supply + cable (see note below)
- Up to 16 GB Micro SD card
- Case
- Ethernet cable
- RTL SDR Blog v3 dongle
- Various short lengths of coax
- Preamp/LNA
- Omnidirectional antenna
Setting up the Raspberry Pi
I chose the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B for my station. There is a Model B+ on the market right now, with a faster processor. But it takes a lot more power and apparently the Ethernet port is a USB device, which is causing a lot of problems (according to the forums).
Downloading/Writing the SD image
The SatNOGs team has done a great job creating a Raspbian image with all the required software. Simply navigate over to the latest tag on Gitlab, and click on the "Zipped image" link under the latest tag. It's about 650 MBytes.
For linux:
- Unzip the downloaded file: unzip image_2018-08-03-Raspbian-SatNOGS-lite.zip
- Figure out which device is the SD card. SD cards are usually start with mmcblk. sudo lsblk
- Write the image. This will take a while. Make sure you don't overwrite your host OS: sudo dd if=2018-08-03-Raspbian-SatNOGS-lite.img of=/dev/mmcblk0
Power notes
Thinking I could save a few bucks, I used a no-name generic 2.4 amp "tablet" USB power supply I got as a freebie, and a micro-USB I use for charging my phone. What a mistake! The
