[amsat-bb] Remote Satellite SDR station with Raspberry Pi.

Matty Cunningham manxmat at hotmail.com
Sun Nov 17 16:13:22 PST 2013


I have been experimenting with Raspberry Pi, for streaming SDR and rotator 
control with Simon Brown's SDR Console V2.

I am looking for a way to remotely stream the audio from my FUNCube Dongle 
(plugged into a Raspberry Pi) and control my rotator (G6LVB type tracker).

So far I have been able to use an ethernet connection only (wired) from the 
controlling PC running SDR console, with the Raspberry Pi,  RTL type TV 
dongle and serial port & rotator controller at the antenna end (eliminating 
lossy and expensive runs of quality coax).

I am running this on the Raspberry Pi as a 'serial console server'

http://lesser-evil.com/2013/04/raspberry-pi-ser2net-cheap-nm16a-serial-console-server/

And running VSPM on the main PC:-
http://k5fr.com/ddutilwiki/index.php?title=VSPM

I have managed to use the DDE server from SDR console, to send data to a 
virtual comm port on the PC with VSPM, this connects over TCP/IP to the 
Raspberry Pi and is controlling the rotators hooked up to a G6LVB type 
tracking interface.

I get around 2mhz of I/Q data from the RTL Dongle into the SDR console by 
running rtl_tcpip on the Raspberry Pi.

SDR Console v2 now has DDE rotator support and a satellite tracking module 
that does automatic doppler correction.

So far so good - I'm very pleased with the results, however I would prefer 
to use the FUNCube dongle for the RF front end, rather than the RTL TV 
dongle as it has better filtering on-board and is vastly superior.

Does anyone know a way of using the rtl_tcpip software with the FUNcube 
dongle?

I'm hoping this is possible.

Thanks and regards

Matty

MD0MAN














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