How to receive and track LoRa Satellites (TinyGS). Incl. innovative ideas for your projects

satellites are fascinating but costly and therefore only available for governments the military and recently also billionaires undiscovered for most there is another trend universities and small companies can build and launch satellites because most of these satellites use open transmission standards everybody can listen to them today we will look at a hobby project which enables us to do so in addition the project uses some innovative concepts where we can learn a lot for our projects and it shows what the maker community can reach if we want gritsy youtubers here is the guy with the swiss accent with a new episode and fresh ideas around sensors and microcontrollers remember if you subscribe you will always sit in the first row in video number 301 we shared the excitement when we saw 16 year old julian launching his first lora satellite fossa sat 1. unfortunately it never was able to unfold its antenna and solar panels so most of us never heard a signal will we be more successful this time a lot happened since then so in this video we will get an update on the launched lora satellites as well as on the planned ones we will build a 20 satellite ground station and connect it to a global network of ground stations we will learn about the very innovative tiny gs project the project team's combination of telegram tasmatizer ota node red and more can be food for thought also for our projects in video number 305 we accompanied the first commercial lora satellite launched by the small lacuna startup company in the meantime they operate three satellites and i still have a sensor in my garden that regularly transmits data through these satellites to ttn here you see the successful transmissions of the last 30 days most of the days more than one satellite passes my home and receives my data on the 868 megahertz ism band what happened to julian's company fosasat and the project we started back then to build a ground station to receive the packets fosazat built new satellites which are planned to be launched during the next few days the launcher will be firefly but the chance these satellites will be deployed is not 100 because it seems to be their first launch and there is no news about when the start really will take place fortunately in summer fosazat plans to launch more satellites using a space x rocket in parallel many more satellite projects were started by universities some of them have already launched and more are planned during this year if corona permits and the ground stations to track the satellites we built back then it was extended and renamed into tiny gs because now it can track all sorts of satellites very valuable for the satellite owners because they get a global coverage let's start with the different satellite projects you find a comprehensive collection on the tiny gs home page all projects have different purposes use different frequencies and modulations but a closer look reveals a few patterns all are leo or low earth orbit satellites because their tracks are only a few hundred kilometers away from the surface they move extremely fast across our homes and are only visible for minutes on the other hand they appear quite often in contrary to geostationary satellites which orbit 36 000 kilometers above the equator like that geostationary satellites seem not to move and we can point our satellite dishes in one direction only in my series about the q0100 i built a ground station for such a satellite and talked to another swiss amateur radio operator in antarctica later you will see my 120 centimeter dish on the roof most of these new cubesats use lora modulation and only a few traditional frequency shift keying or fsk modulation we will later see why most of them use the 430 to 440 megahertz amateur radio band only the american ones use the 915 megahertz ism band one satellite will use 137 megahertz and one the 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi band most of them are already launched or will be launched in the next month a perfect time to start with building our new ground station to observe what happens because they transmit on frequencies we easily contract with our standard lora modules such a ground station costs around 20 dollars i will use this ttco lora module which uses wi-fi to transfer the received messages to the internet there are other similar ports available and we will later see how the tiny gs project deals with the different pin assignments of these sports but why do most of the projects use lora modulation the link budget of lora is very high this means that we can receive signals from low power satellites using standard antennas if you want to know more about the link budget you can watch video number 112. as said before the satellites change their relative speed while passing our location like police cars passing by they create a doppler effect that changes the frequency we receive standard modulations do not like such frequency changes and stop working if we do not regularly adjust our receivers laura uses so-called chirps which vary in frequency and therefore is much less susceptible to frequency changes enough talked let's now build our ground station we only need a few things an esp32 board with a lora module for the frequency range we want to listen to remember that you have to choose between the 433 868 and the 915 megahertz version i use a 433 megahertz module because most of the satellites transmit in this range the tiny gs team is also happy if we build 915 megahertz devices because up till now they are rare next we need software that is capable to decoding the received packages fortunately this is provided by the tiny gs project then we need an antenna i built a ground plane as shown in video number 369 as you see it has decent performance on the whole band last but not least we need power and the case i use such a small 5 volt power supply and my standard waste pipe with a 3d printed holder for the board and the power supply inserted from the bottom the whole device is powered by mains and automatically connects to wifi in the video description you find a link to the needed software you can compile your version but the easiest way is to download the project's firmware uploader just select the right com port and hit upload done in my opinion this way of software distribution invented by the tasmatizer project is the way to go for many future projects particularly for esp32 projects where all subsequent updates can be done using over the air updates if you want to use this method for your project i suggest studying the changes tiny gs had to make to tasmatizer these are probably the changes you have to make to create an upload for your project now we can configure our particular port the display shows that we have as usual to connect to my tiny gs and call 192 168 4 1 to get the configuration screen and as usual we have to enter a name a password the wi-fi credentials and our station's position there is no need to enter the exact position if you do not want to show other people where you live this position is used to determine which satellite is visible above your ground station the next step also can be used as a blueprint for other projects the mqtt credentials are created using the telegram app in telegram you have to search for tiny personal bot it offers four options the first option creates your mqtt credentials the last one creates a private link to your user console by the way do you want to know how they do this telegram integration they use node-red it has all the capabilities to work with telegram i use it in a much less sophisticated way for my projects as a dead man's pedal for my sensors because i expect a message every few minutes from my awning remote control something went haywire if no message arrives for 5 minutes or 300 seconds and this note sends a message to my telegram bot simple and efficient if you want to know how to integrate telegram into node-red you can watch video number 270. next you have to select the board they implemented some sort of autoconfig where the sketch tries to determine which board you use also a cool idea that could be used for many other projects particularly with the many slightly different ttgo boards it reduces user intervention and frustration they include all supported boards with their respective pins and addresses then the sketch has to check all possible pins and addresses to see if it gets an answer if not it tries the next configuration we can also use this idea to improve how we design our projects especially if we want to make them available for many users before you hit apply and reset the part please check the other tick marks of the config only select enable tx if you are a licensed ham and automatic firmware update if you trust the project after a few seconds you get a telegram message that your new ground station is connected to the network and you see its ip address on the oled if you connect to this address you see this menu please log in with admin and the password you choose before the dashboard shows that your station is connected to the tiny gs network and is already waiting for the next satellite crossing your location but how does this small device know which satellite will be next people who watched video number 302 know that there is software available to predict satellite tracks here you see g predict where i chose the two currently active lora satellites norbi and sdsat i'm currently outside of their footprints and not able to receive them here you see an example of an sd sat pass across my antenna if you watch your receiver's dashboard you will discover a change in receiving frequency and modulation parameters from time to time because i selected allow automatic tuning tiny gs gets this information from the project to prepare for the next satellite pass you do not have to care here you also will see when your station received packets from space if you go to tinygs.com you should find your station as well as all tracked satellites depicted on a map test satellite ism 433.3 by the way is not an active satellite it will be used by a second lora board and emulate this satellite to test our receiver before we deploy it on the roof this step is optional if you trust your work you can deploy your receiver without further testing and wait till it receives satellite data but because i'm an engineer i treat untested systems like defective systems this is why i flash a second board with the same software the same mqtt credentials but with a different name and tick enable tx this part now acts as my test satellite legally transmitting on 433.3 megahertz in the ism band we go now to our user console you got the address from your tiny gs personal bot here we see our boards and also that messages they received we select the test satellite for both boards and send a message by pressing p in the user console of the test satellite if everything worked you get a success message in telegram now we know that our receiver is working do not forget to select automatic tuning for your receiver if you want to receive different satellites and deploying on the outside where it can see the sky the test board is no more needed and can be used for another project this is my finished station to keep my antenna apart from the tube i use a semi-rigid coax cable it can be bent to the position you want and it stays there very convenient for such applications let's put it on the roof you see it gets more and more crowded here is the lora gateway this is the weather balloon tracker of video number 360. this is the q0100 ground station this one is for 2 meters and 70 centimeters ham radio and this long wire for 3.6 to 30 megahertz it is suitable for direct contacts around the world so my new satellite tracker is in good company and it will never feel lonely maybe even a little beaten up if this antenna transmits 100 watts nearby and did i already receive satellite messages yes of course norbi works well and i regularly get messages when it passes overhead i see the messages in my user console as well as in the tiny gs telemetry channel by the way here you can see how far lora transmissions can travel if there is a line of sight of course i hope somebody will set up additional ground stations in areas like south africa or the us heartlands also asia is not covered enough and what should we remember satellite technology became affordable that even makers can participate the tiny gs project is very innovative combining cloud services with standard boards they were able to create a global tracking network for all sorts of satellites automated firmware uploaders should be considered as a standard for software distribution provisioning of credentials and other secret data using telegram bots is a cool idea it uses readily available services for our purpose i put such hacks in the same category as ikea hacks this network is essential for future experimental satellites because they can rely on a network of ground stations with more notes than nasa and spacex together all made by makers i like it as always you find the relevant links in the description i hope this video was useful or at least interesting for you if true please consider supporting the channel to secure its future existence thank you bye

Channel: Andreas Spiess

Views: 39,789

Rating: 4.9565892 out of 5

Keywords: AliExpress, Aliexpress quality, arduino, arduino project, beginners, do-it-yourself, eevblog, electronics, esp32, esp32 datasheet, esp32 project, esp32 tutorial, esp32 weather station, esp8266 datasheet, esp8266 project, Field Effect Transistor, greatscott, hack, hobby, how to, iot, lora, lorawan, n-channel, project, simple, smart home, ttgo, tutorial, wifi, Raspberry Pi, Zoom, Microsoft, Docker, Aliexpress, Amazon, Banggood, Satellite, QO-100, SpaceX, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, TinyGS, LoRa Satellites, cubesat

Id: ltJQjqm5bKA

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021