Distributed Ground Station Network

Tracking Everything!

[aerospaceresearch-blog]

This is the “Only 6 days left to NASA Space Apps Challenge Stuttgart 2015” reminder.

NASA Space Apps Challenge in a nutshell * biggest global hackathon * 2 days (11./12. April 2015) * 4 space challenges, many open source projects (Outer Space, Earth, Robotics, Humans) * > 90 cities around the world, > 6000 participants * solve global problems, win awards and prizes * form your team, your talent, your start-up (software, hardware, media, everything)

Register today for Space Apps Stuttgart 2015 > https://2015.spaceappschallenge.org/location/stuttgart/ (it is free!) > 11.-12. April, opening 13:00 o’clock, late start possible > shackspace, Stuttgart Hackerspace, Ulmer Str. 255 (U4/U9 “Im Degen”) > one project was already started in an early kick-off (BigWhoop[4]), now it is yours to be started! :)

Take your chance to solve global problems. We are looking forward to meet you. Hack space!

Your Space Apps Stuttgart team

#### Full News #### We, AerospaceResearch.net (a DGLR student team at the University of Stuttgart) are proud in bringing back the NASA Space Applications Challenge (Space Apps) to Stuttgart[0]. This year the goal is have a bigger, better event as well as a small head-start to give us a better chance at winning one of the awards. And we are inviting you to become a part of it!

The Space Apps Hackaton event will be held during 11.-12. April, we will open the doors at 13:00 o’clock on Saturday and you can always come and join during the full weekend. For early birds, we will already open the location Friday, 10. April at 20:00 o’clock for a warm-up and mingling phase in our location at Stuttgart hackerspace shackspace.

There will be several challenges and projects provided by NASA for you to work on. Just visit https://2015.spaceappschallenge.org/challenge/ and select one. The AerospaceResearch.net team is working on the Distributed Ground Station Network[1] for tracking small satellites and its proof-of-concept project BigWhoop, a global sensor grid for radio spectrum monitoring with software defined radio. You can either join the team or work on any of the other projects.

We already hosted Space Apps in Stuttgart’s creative hackerspace shackspace in 2012 and it was a great event for working on space projects within an interdisciplinary team as well as for networking and founding a start-up. So feel invited to be part of this great space event and the global space community!

For more information feel free to contact us. There will be food ordering and a free box of Club Mate Cola! And we will also have free “DVB-T sticks” as give-aways, because these will be our sensors!. You can even join the team from abroad, or you just attend one of the many other Space Apps locations[0]!

Just come and hack space!

Your Space Apps Stuttgart team

About Space Apps: Space Apps is an international mass collaboration/hackathon focused on space exploration that takes place over a 48-hours timespan in cities all around the world. The event embraces collaborative problem solving with a goal of producing relevant open-source solutions to address global needs applicable to both life on Earth and life in space. NASA supplies different challenges which you can tackle.[2]

### About the Event: ### Free entrance! Everyone’s welcome! Date: Saturday and Sunday, 11.-12. April, opening 13:00 o’clock Driving direction: U4/U9 Stop “Im Degen”, Ulmer Straße 255, Stuttgart Wangen (next to Kulturhaus Arena) Kindly supported by DGLR Stuttgart

[0] https://2015.spaceappschallenge.org/location/stuttgart/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC4Ls3AGHf4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/user/AppsChallenge [3] like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SpaceAppsStuttgart [4] https://2015.spaceappschallenge.org/project/bigwhoop-global-spectrum-monitoring/

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

Our current receiver prototype configuration needs two USB connections. What if you only have one? Parasitic power robbing! It works fine, no magic smoke was released, so we solder the rest together! :)

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

Here it is, or video of the "Next Generation Plenary" at the International Astronautical Congress 2014 in Toronto. Andreas Hornig had been on of the panelists together with Chris Vasko, Victoria Alonsoperez, Helia Sharif, Idriss Sisaïd and John Walker. The panel was moderated by Canadian Astronaut Cmdr. Chris Hadfield. Watch the official video now, we intend to do another mashup with our video and the presentation that cannot be seen in this video. We hope you like it anyway. Andreas and the other panelists really enjoyed it being on stage presenting the projects and discussing with the audience. A big thank you from our sides to the audience!

For the application videos of all the panelists, go to the official IAF webpage.

More to come...!

[measuringeverything]

First GPS tests with great outcome: We measured the PPM inaccuracy of the SDR quartz to about 30 to 35 ppm and it was also influenced by the operating temperature. Besides that, this offset was stable and we were able to find the pulse duration of about 2048060 samples. The SDR itself was set to record with 2048000 Hz. The reftick finding will be used to have the start for the relative measurement to further signal markers within the streams… But if you like, you find the three sample waves with IQ input here, hadez and bronsen (and a little me) coded a first prototype software for analysis, and below is my result. I know you can do it even faster and better than me, so have fun with the files and finding the refticks  :D. Keep you posted.

needle length = 368640 samples per frame = 1 samples = 368640 select samples 368688 gap# | start index | start offset | p2p samples | p2p seconds || [data below] 0 23 1130555 1130555 0.55201209729 1 24 3178626 2048071 1.0000043944 2 25 5226697 2048071 1.0000043944 3 25 7274767 2048070 1.00000390613 4 23 9322838 2048071 1.0000043944 5 24 11370909 2048071 1.0000043944 6 23 13418980 2048071 1.0000043944 7 25 15467050 2048070 1.00000390613 needle length = 368640 samples per frame = 1 samples = 368640 select samples 368660 gap# | start index | start offset | p2p samples | p2p seconds || [data below] 0 10 1719348 1719348 0.839499976075 1 10 3744284 2024936 0.98870834965 2 10 5792344 2048060 0.999999023467 3 10 7840404 2048060 0.999999023467 4 10 9888464 2048060 0.999999023467 5 10 11936524 2048060 0.999999023467 6 9 13984396 2047872 0.999907229371 7 11 16032456 2048060 0.999999023467 8 11 18080516 2048060 0.999999023467 9 9 20128576 2048060 0.999999023467 10 11 22176636 2048060 0.999999023467 11 9 24224696 2048060 0.999999023467 12 11 26272756 2048060 0.999999023467 13 11 28320816 2048060 0.999999023467 14 9 30368875 2048059 0.999998535201 15 11 32416935 2048060 0.999999023467 16 11 34464995 2048060 0.999999023467 17 10 36513054 2048059 0.999998535201 18 10 38561114 2048060 0.999999023467 19 10 40609174 2048060 0.999999023467 20 9 42657233 2048059 0.999998535201 21 9 44705293 2048060 0.999999023467 22 11 46753353 2048060 0.999999023467 23 10 48801412 2048059 0.999998535201 24 10 50849470 2048058 0.999998046934 25 9 52897531 2048061 0.999999511734 26 10 54945590 2048059 0.999998535201 27 10 56993650 2048060 0.999999023467 needle length = 368640 samples per frame = 1 samples = 368640 select samples 368688 gap# | start index | start offset | p2p samples | p2p seconds || [data below] 0 23 294799 294799 0.143944824219 1 23 2342862 2048063 1.00003076172 2 25 4390924 2048062 1.00003027344 3 24 6438986 2048062 1.00003027344 4 23 8487050 2048064 1.00003125 5 24 10534948 2047898 0.999950195312 6 24 12583173 2048225 1.00010986328 7 24 14631236 2048063 1.00003076172 8 25 16679261 2048025 1.00001220703 9 24 18727363 2048102 1.00004980469 10 25 20775427 2048064 1.00003125 11 23 22823485 2048058 1.00002832031 12 24 24871488 2048003 1.00000146484 13 24 26919563 2048075 1.00003662109 14 23 28967672 2048109 1.00005322266 15 24 31015710 2048038 1.00001855469 16 24 33063728 2048018 1.00000878906 17 24 35111771 2048043 1.00002099609 18 23 37159922 2048151 1.00007373047 19 23 39207984 2048062 1.00003027344 20 25 41256047 2048063 1.00003076172 21 24 43304108 2048061 1.00002978516 22 24 45352108 2048000 1.0 23 24 47400233 2048125 1.00006103516 24 23 49448272 2048039 1.00001904297 25 23 51496357 2048085 1.00004150391 26 25 53544420 2048063 1.00003076172 27 24 55592485 2048065 1.00003173828 28 24 57640508 2048023 1.00001123047 29 25 59688607 2048099 1.00004833984 30 25 61736669 2048062 1.00003027344 31 23 63784722 2048053 1.00002587891 32 23 65832792 2048070 1.00003417969 33 23 67880855 2048063 1.00003076172 34 23 69928917 2048062 1.00003027344 35 23 71976980 2048063 1.00003076172 36 24 74025043 2048063 1.00003076172

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

Does our RTL-SDR dongle survive direct 1 pulse-per-second feeding to its antenna input? That was a question we raised and thought about for about 1 attosecond before we decide "hell yeah, let's try that and see what happens!". And it worked out pretty neat! That's cool if sdr hardware is cheap as dirt and you can replace it very easily. But before I bore you with impulsive reaction facts, what you see on the waterfall diagrams is a rock radio station near Stuttgart and our test pulse that came in every 2342ms for 100ms. We expected the additional voltage to level up the input power, but it did the opposite. It saturated the first capacitor and then added to the adc reducing the sensitivity. But it also served our goal to have a trigger mark in the input signal. And best thing, in fm we could still listen to the Blues Brothers without any disturbance! ;)

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

Marta is doing a pretty fine work on the lone-pseudoranger code she is doing for Google Summer of Code. The code calculates the position of the beacon signals. In this case, two satellites are beeping around, the red and the blue sat and by using all those white circled ground stations, their tracks can be determined. There are further images here on flickr.

The next steps are to improve accuracy by adding some filtering and clustering mechanisms. Stay tuned...

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

@Google just published the accepted proposals for Summer of Code @gsoc. Congratulations to our 4 students! #codeon. Two students will work on DGSN! So good luck. More information later…for now it’s celebration…

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

Our "You are welCOME!" app for the NASA spaceapps​ challenge. Let's build the DistributedGroundStationNetwork. We took part in this awesome hack-a-thon and you find our 27MHz transmitter and receiver design on their page. Watch our short youtube video and then come back and join the DGSN! :)

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

Last message for @NASA @spaceapps of today, in morse! Perhaps you find out! ;) Just tweet @ARDNnews

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

Some hardware hacking for NASA's Space Apps Challenge 2014. We try to get our 27 MHz transmitter running! :) Finger's crossed!

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

The Distributed Ground Station Network (DGSN) is one of the Google Summer of Code 2014 ideas of AerospaceResearch.net and we're really happy to see that a lot of you are interested in it.

AerospaceResearch.net posted this graph on their blog:

Some more @GSOC statistics: 33 students, 1.7878787878 proposals per student, mostly proposals for our ideas. But also new ideas and 2 of them made us smile! :)

Fingers crossed for all of you! :)

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

timing board v0.01. It is able to measure signal run times through cables. We also had different effects on different materials (see graph). But we couldn't get a deterministic behaviour with the TX/RX modules. So we have to work on that....

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

Distributed Ground Station Network @ IAC-13 (paper)

64th International Astronautical Congress, Beijing, China. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License, 2...

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

You love tracking satellites, support open-source and like coding and getting paid for it? Then you should read this. You can work on DGSN as part of Google Summer of Code and AerospaceResearch.net during the summer. Besides $5500 it is worth it, because it's space! Apply today. Student application deadline is 21. March!

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

Let us explain what we actually do. This is our DGSN project at the International Astronautical Congress 2013 in Beijing. It gives a brief overview.

[distributedgroundstationnetwork]

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..." The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

This blog is meant to be for you, so that you are able to track us working on the Distributed Ground Station Network. It shall be used to track satellites and make space a little bit less "big"! Feel invited to join building the grid, or just listen...