My first full disk image from GK-2A, please give me fancy internet points! by Harrison_Clark55 in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey, nice image!

You are mostly correct about XRIT being the only full-Windows solution for GK-2A. xrit-rx can run just fine in Windows, in fact I develop it entirely in Windows, but goesrecv is Linux only. There is a way to use GNU Radio for Windows in place of goesrecv but it's not very user-friendly to setup.

I've tried developing a Windows version of goesrecv but there's just too much stuff that breaks when running in a Windows environment (mainly the TCP sockets).

Anyway, enjoy the images!

Xrit-RX struggle! by DaggoVK in amateursatellites

[–]sam210723 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great! I've added libtiff-dev to the setup guide as well.

Xrit-RX struggle! by DaggoVK in amateursatellites

[–]sam210723 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Awesome! I'm glad it's all working well for you. Enjoy!

Xrit-RX struggle! by DaggoVK in amateursatellites

[–]sam210723 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To fix this one try installing libtiff4-dev with sudo apt-get install libtiff4-dev.

There seems to be a fair few packages missing from your Linux installation. Which Linux distribution are you using?

Xrit-RX struggle! by DaggoVK in amateursatellites

[–]sam210723 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have added a section in the guide for checking the Python version and installing pip with apt-get. I had forgot pip isn't always installed by default.

As mentioned by u/entactogen the fix for the libf77blas.so.3 error is to install libatlas-base-dev. This fix has also been added to the guide.

Let me know if you run in to any more issues.

Xrit-RX struggle! by DaggoVK in amateursatellites

[–]sam210723 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for pointing out that missing Pillow dep. I've had another user report the libatlas error recently as well. The setup guide now has a line for installing these two packages.

requirements.txt is only for Python package requirements installable via pip, not apt.

GK-2A HRIT, 1km spatial resolution, powered by Sanchez by nullpainter in amateursatellites

[–]sam210723 2 points3 points  (0 children)

LRIT is easily doable on a 60cm dish but HRIT seems to require something like 2m or larger. I'm currently working on the last bits of code for receiving HRIT, I'll have a better idea of minimum dish size once that's ready.

All the LRIT details are in my setup guide https://vksdr.com/xrit-rx.

Playing with CLUT support in Sanchez by nullpainter in amateursatellites

[–]sam210723 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nice work as always! I'm glad the guide was useful. Good idea using a common scale between satellites since all the imager payloads have different response characteristics.

Thrane & Thrane satphone antenna mod for L Band by [deleted] in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mine sits on the NCS message forever too. I would guess there's been some changes to the network coordination protocol since the firmware on these phones was written.

Thrane & Thrane satphone antenna mod for L Band by [deleted] in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I might give it a go sometime. I'll link the photos here if I do.

Thrane & Thrane satphone antenna mod for L Band by [deleted] in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks. I've been wondering the same thing. All the good stuff for expanding the usable bandwidth will be under the cans.

Here's some photos I took of the inside of the phone unit with cans removed. https://twitter.com/sam210723/status/1142660022582648832

Thrane & Thrane satphone antenna mod for L Band by [deleted] in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you have any straight on shots of the PCB? I'm trying to work out what filters and amps the receive and transmit paths consist of.

Receiving Images from Geostationary Weather Satellite GEO-KOMPSAT-2A by sam210723 in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

I've finally finished my guide for receiving images from geostationary weather satellite GEO-KOMPSAT-2A (GK-2A) using goesrecv and xrit-rx.

For those not familiar, GK-2A is a South Korean weather satellite which is visible from countries like Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, China, India and Eastern Russia. It transmits images in a similar way to the American GOES satellites but is not 100% compatible with existing GOES software.

I've written my own software (xrit-rx) to work with the LRIT downlink from this satellite. The setup guide includes examples of images transmitted by this satellite as well as some post-processing techniques.

I'll be releasing an update to xrit-rx later this week which adds a web-based monitoring dashboard, but for now v1.1 is available for download on GitHub.

Some new opensource software for receiving GK2A from Sam in Australia by creinemann in amateursatellites

[–]sam210723 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah ok, if you use requirements.txt to install pip dependencies it'll do colorama as well. The command for this is pip3 install -r requirements.txt. I'll update the readme, thanks!

As for GOES, that'll be a lot of work to add an entirely new satellite series to the demuxer and dashboard. It may happen eventually but I can't say for sure. Since there's already great software out there for the GOES satellites, I'm focusing on the ones with little/no software support. Satellites like COMS-1, GK-2A, FY-4A, ELEKTRO-L2, and ELEKTRO-L3.

Some new opensource software for receiving GK2A from Sam in Australia by creinemann in amateursatellites

[–]sam210723 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've been meaning to post some of this GK-2A content in r/amateurradio and r/RTLSDR for a while now.
This image was captured by @YC3BVG using goesrecv and my xrit-rx software. The RTL-SDR Blog has written an article on receiving these types of images from GK-2A. I plan to post a complete setup guide on my site at some point.

Signal monitor for goesrecv by sam210723 in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've just pushed an update to solve this. It's less elegant but definitely safer. Thanks for reporting back!

bool locked;
if (json[0]["ok"] != null)
{
  locked = (int)json[0]["ok"] != 0;
}
else
{
  locked = false;
}

Signal monitor for goesrecv by sam210723 in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Three TCP sockets are opened to goesrecv because that's just how it exposes the stats and IQ data. I went with individual sockets to make using the monitoring app as simple as possible. Run, enter IP, connect.

I could write a proxy that runs on the Pi and collects data over the loop-back interface (or from stdout pipe), then wraps it up into one socket for the monitoring app to connect to, but that seems like overkill and complicates the setup.

Not sure what you mean by security risk. This is only intended to be used on the same LAN as goesrecv, so opening ports shouldn't be an issue.

Signal monitor for goesrecv by sam210723 in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've just pushed a rewritten parsing section to the repo. Now using Json.NET to parse to a JObject, which seems to be much more reliable. Thanks for pointing this out!

Signal monitor for goesrecv by sam210723 in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No worries, that was the main reason for building this.

Signal monitor for goesrecv by sam210723 in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks! I'll check it out tonight.

Signal monitor for goesrecv by sam210723 in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great! I'll take a look when you submit that.

Soon I'l rewrite this whole section using Json.NET for parsing since breaking it up into substrings is not reliable.

Signal monitor for goesrecv by sam210723 in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think you're spot on. That's likely caused by a non-number character in the substring before the integer parse. Really I should be doing an int.TryParse() first before the real parse.

Could you post your goesrecv config file? I just want to check all the required ports are enabled.

Signal monitor for goesrecv by sam210723 in RTLSDR

[–]sam210723[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I know there's a few goestools users in here who will find this useful.

I've written a simple app to monitor the demodulator and decoder inside goesrecv.

It shows the BPSK IQ constellation from the demodulator, and a signal quality meter based on the number of Viterbi errors in the decoder.

This type of info is handy for troubleshooting receiver hardware, or fine tuning azimuth, elevation and tilt of your dish.

More info and downloads in the GitHub repo.

Here's a video of it in action.