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So I'll start the whole thing now.
Hello and welcome.
Today, you will hear a little bit
about Saturnus.
Basically, it's the ground control
station for the satellites that
you might see there or any other
satellites, probably so you can
look and control
your stuff that you just don't build
an expensive piece of space trash.
You need the station to actually see what
it does and give it signals
how that's working out.
Nickelsville will explain.
Give us a warm welcome for Niko's with
Sevenoaks.
Hello, everybody. Uh, so, yeah,
we're going to talk about, uh, Zanuck's,
uh, before I dove into the to
the project, some introductory
tweets about we are and what we do.
I guess you already had some of that
stuff if you were in the beginning of the
previous book.
So why the, uh,
Libya Space Foundation?
It's a foundation profit foundation.
We founded actually to
support schnooks.
But in the process, other projects
were developed outside the, uh, the
foundation. And the mission of the
foundation is to advance and use
open source technologies, uh, in space.
So, uh, trying to
push the boundaries of open source to,
uh, the final frontier, pretty
much, uh, the space.
And we come from the initial police
of Zanuck's, uh, comes from the
Athens hackerspace in Greece, uh,
it's a hackerspace, uh,
as you might expect, with, uh, a lot of
tools and a lot of intelligent
people coming together with various
backgrounds and various skill sets.
We have people that are space
enthusiasts, uh, radio amateurs,
uh, but also coders and developers
and.
As you will see along the dock, sadness
is a project that required many
different skills and many different kinds
of people to work on that show.
The fact that we have this one
place and one physical place to meet
really accelerated the success of
the project.
Which, uh, uh, you may
have heard of that already.
So what we started about three
years ago and
about six months after we started,
we won the Hakodate prize.
Uh.
And that was a big moment for
us because it boosted the project both
in terms of, uh, uh,
financially because it was a financial
price, but also in terms of
community, uh, expanding
because it makes the project very well
known to certain communities, especially,
uh, Radiometer.
So space, uh,
hiker's.
So what's the project, the
initial idea is that this is a,
uh, a picture of, uh,
objects around Earth.
There are thousands of satellites,
especially in the U.S.
orbit.
And as, uh,
Pierrot's explained, the previous, uh,
and I'm sure many of you may
also be involved in various university
or, uh, even hackerspace projects
to build CubeSat and satellites
in general.
So these are the teams that build this
CubeSat, sometimes in the rush of
building their satellites.
Sometimes they don't focus much
on the ground station or the
of the earth side of things.
Uh, so many of the teams,
they launch a satellite in orbit and
that sometimes they don't
even have a ground station to listen to
it or talk to it.
Sometimes they only they have the
resources and the expertize to build one
ground station in the university or in
the in a place.
They they are located and
they just wait for one or
two times per day to listen
to the satellite when the satellite
is above them.
And that's a problem that, uh.
Every team like that faces,
so this is a diagram
of how nano satellites exploded
over the last years.
This is a diagram for CubeSat.
That's another kind of satellite by
pocket, for instance.
So as you can see this,
the trend is that more and more
satellites are put into orbit.
And in most of these cases, nobody
actually communicates with them.
Uh, so it's a
it's pretty much a problem of scale.
And the idea we had back back
then three years ago was
what if we could build
a network?
What if we could build a network of
ground stations and try to solve
this problem of scale in open source
manner and crowdsource model and,
uh, see how this
works and how much the
how how big this network can be and
actually solve this problem.
To give you a quick overview,
what I'm talking about network, we're
talking about something like this on the
left side, it's the users,
which could be people who want
to to communicate
with satellites. That can be anyone
pretty much, but also satellite
operators, operators themselves.
And the network gives
the gives them access to, uh,
a a few ground stations
or a lot of grouchiness around the world
and schedule observations for satellites.
So instead of everyone building its own
ground station in one place, you have a
global network of available ground
stations.
Similar to the to the CubeSat project to
Ubisoft, we also try to find
out what's already there.
So building a
global network ground station is not an
easy job because many, uh,
many moving parts.
So we try to see if there are other
people out there building open ground
stations, if there is software, open
source that we could use either at ground
station or the network site, the things
with the Web services
side of things.
Uh, unfortunately, the one the one many
things. So for most of their components,
we had done the project, uh, we pretty
much read everything from scratch
and we tried to do it in a modular way.
So, uh, you don't
have to use the entire stack of Zanuck's.
If you want to just observe a satellite
you can use you can just build the
ground station. But if you have a ground
station already, you can just plug
it in the network and use the rest of the
Zionist project or the other way around.
So it's a modular project, so
the, uh,
Dave maldita some parts, some
models of this project, so it consists
of the network side of things of the
client, which is a software that runs on
the ground station itself.
There are data on the ground station
antennas, of course, and DEBE,
which is, uh, a Web service
that I will talk in detail
in a bit.
So starting from there, the ground
level, we built a
rotation for a ground station.
In an albatross manner, we everything
on these rotators, of course,
where we try to keep
the cost low, so we used, uh,
we decided in a way that can be half
parts of that 3D printed or parts
that you can easily find in a cheap way,
uh, in a store.
And you can either
build your own, uh,
ground station or just use any data
that's supported by Libyan
city.
Also, one of the things that we wanted to
achieve in order to keep
the cost low, but also make it more
accessible, both in terms of, uh,
cost, but also how to
eat away, how to to make it easier for
you to build a ground station.
We also try to keep the toolchain we use
open source.
So if you try to build a ground
station, you don't have to buy any
expensive software or rely on a
proprietary solution.
So, first of all, we're using a high
tech web, uh,
a web, uh, built by a large boat.
That's, uh, an easy way
to showcase, uh, construction, uh,
steps, manufacturing steps of, uh,
of a hardware device, uh,
in our case, our data.
So if you go to our
instance, you can see pictures
and videos for easily steps how to build
the station.
OK, of course, is open source itself,
we use open source tools
to build and design
the parts of the rotator
freckled keycard.
You got that's for Antenna's.
And that's ah, yeah, of course, we
also like to build our own rotation, so
this is their data controller.
And all of this is,
of course, open source and all of the
schematics and designs are or aren't
repositories.
So this is a photo of a bit
of a ground station later,
but, uh, so you can
see this is actually
a reference platform, but you can use any
different kind of setups, reference
platforms based on that as well.
By 3:00 a.m.
is the hour.
But as I said in the beginning, it's
really modular, so if you don't like
Rasberry, you can use Linux or,
uh, another Abedi device.
So the requirement here is that you
will rely on Python and, uh,
radio, at least for our client
software.
And you can see that it can be really
packed in a in a small box that
you can find easily.
So what we do for the, uh,
for the client software we're using
also here, Obejas, uh, tools
to to build, uh,
uh, rasberry by three imagist.
So we use, uh, the continuous
integration, uh, platform
of GitHub. And we combine that with
Byrant by gennies a project to
help help you kickstart, uh,
Rosebank images, which is
meant for robbery.
And we also use to orchestrate
all the changes we do on top of default
rasberry.
And in the end, what you get is, uh, uh,
uh, Raspberry Pi three emad's
with all the sudden shuffle ready to be,
uh, uh, in the Raspberry Pi three.
Uh, so we we have currently
also nightly bills, but also we
try to cover regular loses in a more
stable fashion.
So these are some photographs from
various ground stations around the world,
so, uh, on the left,
for instance, is that one of the top
of the rooftop of the hackerspace in
Athens, uh, where
Diana Australia, California
on the left and in the middle of downie's
the one in Copenhagen,
as you can see, that one is
without the data, just a turnstile
antenna, which is really good
for NOAA weather satellite.
So you can see a different kind
of ground station with different setups.
So on.
This is a quick
view of the map of globalization around
the world.
I come back to there to this a bit later,
but you can see that, uh, they're
pretty scattered all over the world.
So now let's go
back to the let's go to the clouds
side of things, this is that
sadness to be.
So when we started the project, one of
the problems we had is that we didn't
find any centralized
place for information about satellites.
So the only way that we could
have satellites in order to have
observations about them, to communicate
with them, was to just
dig around blogs and websites,
unfortunately. And we
decided to create one website
that will, in the same manner,
use crowdsourced methodologies to
gather all that information in one place,
most importantly, frequencies about
satellites.
So right now, we have
about 220 satellites
with information about frequency
transmitters.
And that's keeps expanding, it's a
website that gives the possibility, the
ability to satellite
operators, but pretty much do
anything to submit suggestions
about new satellites or information for
existing satellites.
We have a team of moderators that
vet this information.
Eventually looks to be also
end up to be a place where we gather all
telemetry data from the observations
decoded telemetry data, and
that includes that includes not only
data that come from Zanuck's but also
from other tools.
We have the talent for water, for
instance, and.
And I think that's, uh, and collect
the data that come from a satellite
project and also deeply saddened
public API, and I'm
sure most of you know you predict.
So you just sat next to be
to affects frequency information for all
the satellite.
Uh, yeah, I think we just passed
the ten million frames, uh,
barrier, uh, for satellites recently.
Yeah, as I said, to be, uh,
we have to go to telemetry data, that's
not an easy thing to do because the
decoding information for satellites is
not always easy to find
and its satellite may have its own spec
to deal with
with it. So here is a short,
uh, snippet of
a decoder for the unit that you see
on the left, but in a similar manner.
We have our own decoder for our own, uh,
CubeSat Ubisoft's.
So we go the the
the limited data.
We know the specific way these
satellite, uh, uh,
since the data, for instance, uh,
temperature, voltage and stuff like that.
So we know how to decode them.
And then, uh, the next project
we're trying to build is actually create
some telemetry dashboards for the
satellite. So we started to see how these
values change across time.
So let's go today to the network,
which is actually there.
Let's get the observational orchestration
tool, uh,
of Zanuck's.
This is the place that all ground
stations actually connect through
a rest API and push back
all the observations.
But also it's the place where they fetch
all the observations they need to do.
So the goal is, well, first of all,
let me explain what the observation of
observation actually contains and
we'll see in detail in
a few slides later, that
observation contains
a wonderful demodulator, odille
and demodulator data.
And we'll see some, uh, examples
of that later.
Uh, here you see, as,
Greta, the purchase of a gas station.
And some satellite buzzes,
uh, for that specific,
uh, ground station, so the
network gives you the ability to
orchestrate and schedule observations
that can happen in two ways.
Uh, the first one is, let's
assume you are interested in one specific
satellite.
Uh, regarding a satellite
or for whatever reason, you just want to
focus on one satellite so you can
come to this page, you choose your
satellite, you choose a time frame and
the specific transmitter, and you just
see what the observation window is
available. It values out stations
around the world for that specific, uh.
And you can see, for instance, here on
the screen shot that we have two
ground stations that are available
on schedule, that specific observation.
The other ways to go, if you don't really
are a satellite operator or you're not
focused on specific satellites,
if you are a gas station operator, for
instance, you can go on the ground
station and then see what
are the available observation windows,
which are the satellites that actually
pass above you in certain times
in the future. And you can schedule each
one of them. You can see some
metadata about their observations so you
can decide if it's a good pass or not,
if it's too low to high, so on.
And you can schedule all
these individual observations.
So this is from an observation
on the left, you can see the metadata
that the network keeps,
which is pretty much the same metadata
that we showed earlier.
Uh.
On the top left, you can see which is the
satellite, which is the observer, which
is the ground station. So on the bottom,
you can see that clearly the orbital data
that was used for that specific satellite
for a specific purpose.
And on the top, right,
you can see that the McGlade audio with a
spectrogram. So you can cover, uh.
The spectrogram helps to have a visual
representation of the audio.
But also, you have that waterfall,
which helps you quickly understand
if the observation actually returned data
or not, and in some cases
we have the modulated
data, if we know, uh,
how do they model for a specific
satellite? So here is a weather
satellite now so we can decode.
We know that we can decode that data back
to any.
So one of the challenges we had with, uh.
With a network is that, as you can
imagine from the from the previous slide,
that each observation has an audio
file, that audio file can be really large
because we try to keep it as high quality
as possible so we can decode it later.
And the problem with that is that
we have got the scale problem because
we needed so much storage in order to
keep all the observations.
We don't delete any observations.
So one thing we recently did is that we
actually utilized Internet Archive,
which you probably already know.
The archive is one of its
mission statement is to actually archive
open data on the Internet.
So we recently, uh,
switched to Guy to keep, uh,
audio files. So that way we
utilize the Whitlams.
What offers.
So the software
says we are the software we come back
to to the ground station again.
So as I said, there's a Raspberry Pi
within it. But I did say that it
runs a value
shoppers project like Hamlet,
for instance. But we also have our own
client software written in Python that
orchestrates all the necessary work
for for the ground station.
And what the client does is it
fetches all the
observations for that specific
concessions that have already been
scheduled on network.
It starts all the necessary scrapes in
religious groups or, uh,
rotator rochedale scripts to
go to later,
uh, adjust the, uh, the frequency
for correction and
in the end, degenerates that wonderful in
the audio or any other data and
push back the results to the network, as
we said before.
You can use that the easiest way to use
that is associated with harassment by
three, but it's not a long project.
You can use it in a
procedure.
And also because, uh, we try
to to make it as easy as possible
for people to use it, because it's
not necessary that an observer and
operator or a satellite operator is
a leading expert or so.
So we create also where we face
that can run, uh,
that could be accessed in a local network
to access your ground station with a web
to face.
And, uh,
do some configuration, do
some very, uh, basic, uh,
very basic functionality, and we keep
expanding it, uh, so
it can be used for both receiving and
transmitting.
That's the web, the face of the client
software, uh,
first all you can see that that specific
station has a few
observations already scheduled.
And on the bottom, you can see
the logs actually from what
happens on the ground station.
So without actually associating through
the machine, you can see what happens.
And this is a screenshot we
saw on the previous stock also show
there, the client also supports
command and control where their face so
you can easily also communicate
with a satellite. This is the this is for
the Ubisoft. But in a similar
way, this can be
configured to be used for other
satellites to.
So if you want to contribute, there are
many things and there are many different
skills required for the project,
so depending on your skills, you can
contribute either by just building a
great station. That's a
that's a very significant contribution
and help the network expand.
And, uh, depending
on if you are a developer, you can
write code for the software projects.
Some of them are written in see someone
Python, most of them Python
and JavaScript, of course, for the Web
projects.
Uh, and, uh, you
can also join our IFC
channel.
We have an assembly here in the open
infrastructure, uh, open.
I'll be the first actual cluster you can
find as, uh, Labor Space Foundation.
And we can, uh, if you have
any questions, either here or later,
we can discuss.
And so guess even on
the assembly call, the network works in
more detail.
Thank you very much.
So we still have some time for Q&A,
if you have questions.
There are microphones one,
two, three and four in the hall.
Please line up behind them.
I will call you up.
And if you leave before Q&A
is over, please do this in a quiet
manner that we can go on with
Q&A. And thank you.
Starting with Mike one.
I just the simple questions,
are there any
legal implications?
I mean, you could listen to satellites
that you don't own.
Are there any legal implications
for you as a ground operator?
Yeah, yeah, well, uh,
the quick answer is that, uh, we
are mostly focused on Ahmadu satellites
with, uh, frequencies Minamata.
Uh, so you're okay to
listen to them? It's allowed to listen to
them.
Thanks.
Microphone two, please.
I have two questions.
First one is,
what would it cost to build one
complete antenna?
Well, to build depending on the
setup and the parts you choose, of
course, but, uh, more or less around
three hundred, uh, dollars
if you build the holiday data and
antennas.
And if I'm already in the middle
of Europe in a very dense area,
you've showed us the map of ground
stations.
Does it still make sense to it needs more
antennas in these regions or is
it covered? Yeah, because we may have
multiple satellites over your area
and at the moment at least, the ground
station can only pick one at a time.
So the more the better.
Mike, one, please.
I have just a simple question, and can
you receive for us to send data
at both, I mean, the network right
now or the network side of things?
If you visit the website, you see mostly,
of course, observations that we listen
to satellites.
But if you are if you are a satellite
operator, you can contact us and see how
we can, uh, adjust the command
and control we showed so we can talk to
your satellite.
Microphone two, please.
Um, so if you build
your own station, how do you
can you also use it exclusively
or how is this scheduled with other users
who want to use it and you want
to use it in your local amateur
club?
Yeah. So, uh,
right now, the network,
uh, you can make an account on the
network, but if you want to schedule an
observation, you have to be a ground
station operator at ground station owner
yourself.
Uh, we have that to use it as an
incentive for people to build ground
stations. Not everyone can schedule
observation at this point, but
it won't be the face of your client
up in the top. Right.
You can see that there's a network model
that is a standalone mode.
So if for some reason you want to, uh,
put your station in a standalone mode and
move it out of the network just to use
it on your own, you can do that.
But once it's on the network mode, that
means that while it's idle, any other of
the observatories can use it.
Microphone one, please.
You are actually referring to what
the person said before on this
microphone.
It would be actually cool to get
some, like, control
data to those stations
and to control satellites.
A lot of lot of projects actually doing
this outside of the amateur radio
satellite service.
So like the downlink is, is actually
on amateur radio bands like mostly on
UHF. And we have sometimes up
on 13 centimeters or 23.
But like actually what about
watching those developable satellites
also to make actually
the uplink on an amateur radio, satellite
service allocations and actually
to get this to the crowd so everybody can
control the satellites together in the
crowd and actually that they don't have
to invest in some time
shifts at big control stations and big
crowd control stations.
Yeah, there is I mean,
if you have a global network in I
already like we have already made
statements and keep expanding.
Uh, so on the other receiving kind of,
uh, side of things, uh, that it's true.
I mean, you don't have to
buy time.
Another another commercial services, you
can utilize the whole network, uh,
and then transmitting.
You can also do it in a sense.
But since you, uh,
you are the one who knows how to
communicate with your satellite and what
your satellite expects, you to have a
ground station with a command and control
software and actually communicate with
satellite.
I'm not sure if I answered your question.
The Internet has the question,
yes, one user wants
to know what is the ideal minimum
coverage for the ground stations
like 160 kilometer
radius, less or more.
Uh.
Yeah, that's a good question.
Uh, yeah, I don't know
the exact number, to be honest about
that.
Thank you.
OK, we don't have any more time.
It's very sad, but thanks
a lot. Nikko's again, give him
a warm welcome or applause.
Great talk. Thank you very much.