[amsat-bb] How to tame gr-satellites?

[Paul Stoetzer]

It took me about 6 hours of work to get gr-satellites going on my Fedora
handheld computer I used for portable LO-90 operations (and hope to use for
portable Taurus-1 ops soon as well). I have some Linux familiarity, but,
yes you do end up running into wrong versions of dependencies and missing
dependencies and having to look up a lot of things to get things working.

Until recently, I would have suggested that Arch or Manjaro make it really
easy to run gr-satellites because it's a very simple process to build it
from the Arch User Repository. I was able to get it running on an Arch
laptop in about 20 minutes. Unfortunately, gr-satellites does not work with
GNU Radio 3.8 yet and Arch and Manjaro both ship GNU Radio 3.8 by default,
so I can't really suggest that as an "easy solution" any more.

gr-satellites is a great tool and Dani deserves a lot of credit for the
work he has done to support so many different satellites. What would be
great is for someone to develop a method to make it simple to package for
various distributions and a good front-end for using it. That would not be
an easy task, but it would go a long way towards making it friendly for
less experienced Linux users.

73,

Paul, N8HM

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 10:35 AM Hans BX2ABT via AMSAT-BB <
amsat-bb at amsat.org> wrote:

> I was going to write a rant about gr-satellites, but then again that
> would only help me release some of my chagrin and not help met get
> going, so instead the question in the general interes of this list......
>
> "How can mere mortals start to get going with gr-satellites?"
>
> Been a Linux end-user for 20 years now, so I know my way around,
> although I can not claim to be an expert. Usually with a quick search
> online I can find enough info to get going or solve a problem. Even the
> odd alteration in some source code is not something I am strange to,
> although a programmer I am not. And then there is GNU Radio.......which
> almost seems like it comes from another planet. Installing it, no
> problem with the package manager. I even had success with PyBOMBS, until
> that wasn't updated anymore. But then, once you get past the basics
> installation trouble start with OOT modules, dependencies that can't be
> met, and flow graphs that won't compile. My biggest gripe is that
> documentation is very minimalist and often tells you how, not why, which
> doesn't help you in understanding the troubles that you ran into.
> gr-satellites is a good example of that, because Daniel writes these
> bare bones flow graphs and then what? There is no view-able output, not
> many hints on what blocks do, or how to implement them if they are missing.
>
> In short, it seems you first need a four year university course in GNU
> Radio and Python before you can start using it. That seems silly and a
> waste of resources, because even I can see the potential of GNU
> Radio/gr-satellites, especially with this new Taurus-1 sat with Codec-2
> transponder around.
>
> So if you please, share your experience in how beginners can set up and
> use gr-satellites. What are necessary steps? What are pitfalls to avoid?
> And please also the "why", not only the "what". I guess that apart from
> me others will also be grateful for this.
>
> On my shack computer I run the latest Kubuntu version with GNU Radio
> 3.7.13.4 and I guess that is a reasonable starting point because of the
> popularity of Ubuntu and because it is Debian based. Although since a
> lot of GNU Radio needs to be compiled by hand is probably won't matter
> that much.
>
> Reading the above it still does sound a bit like a rant, but it was not
> written as such, believe me. Cheers for the replies and 73 de Hans
>
>
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