Over on GitHub stdevPavelmc has released his software called FAASGS (Fully Automatic Amateur Satellite Ground Station). FAASGS is an open source program that allows RTL-SDR users to set up a satellite ground station that tunes, record and generate images for NOAA APT weather satellites, as well as records FM amateur radio satellites. The software runs on a single board computer such as a Raspberry Pi, however in the authors own setup he uses an Orange Pi Prime board. The features include:

  • Web interface to see the next passes, the recorded ones, and details for it.
  • Receive any satellite in FM mode (SSB is possible but no there is doppler control yet, so no SSB by now)
  • Record the satellite pass and keep the audio for later.
    • APT WX audio is preserved in wav format and 22050 hz of sampling (the format wximage needs to work with)
    • FM audio satellites is preserved in .mp3 mode but with high quality settings, and other tricks.
      • The spectrogram of the audio is embedded as album art (see below).
      • The pass data and receiving station are stored in the mp3 tags.
  • Automatic decode APT images from WX sats (NOAA 15, 18 and 19)
  • For the voice FM sats we craft a spectrogram and embedd the metadata of the pass on the image
FAASGS main screen showing recordings
FAASGS screen showing an FM amateur radio satellite pass