Installing from source
gr-satellites is a GNU Radio out-of-tree module, and can be installed as such, by building it from source in a system where GNU Radio is already installed. The general steps for installing gr-satellites from source include making sure that all the dependencies are installed and then building and installing the out-of-tree module.
Dependencies
gr-satellites requires GNU Radio version at least 3.8. Depending on the GNU Radio version, a different branch of gr-satellites should be used. See the gr-satellites README for more information about the different branches.
Warning
There are some build dependencies for GNU Radio out-of-tree modules that are not required to run GNU Radio, so some distributions might not install them by default when GNU Radio is installed. The main ones that may cause problems are:
swig (only for GNU Radio 3.8)
liborc (in Debian-based distributions
liborc-0.4-dev
is needed)libsndfile (only for GNU Radio 3.9 and greater; in Debian-based distributions
libsndfile1-dev
is needed).spdlog (only for GNU Radio 3.10 and greater; in Debian-based distributions
libspdlog-dev
is needed).
Additionally, the following Python packages are required:
construct, at least version 2.9.
Note
construct and requests can be installed with pip by doing
$ pip3 install --user --upgrade construct requests
Alternatively, construct and requests can be installed from your distribution’s package manager.
Optional dependencies
To use the realtime image decoders, gr-satellites needs feh
Note
feh is best installed through your distribution’s package manager
The decoders that use Mobitex or Mobitex-NX require the GNU Radio out-of-tree
module gr-tnc_nx
, which can be found in beesat-sdr (note that the
maint-3.8
branch is the one which supports GNU Radio 3.8).
Downloading
gr-satellites is developed in the daniestevez/gr-satellites Github repository. It is recommended that you download the latest stable release. You can also browse the list of all releases to see older vesions and pre-releases.
Users interested in collaborating with testing or developing gr-satellites can clone the git repository and use the main branch. There is more information about the organization in branches in the README.
Building and installing
gr-satellites can be built and installed using cmake. The following can be run inside the directory containing the gr-satellites sources:
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo ldconfig
After running make
, you can run the tests by doing make test
in the
build/
directory.
Note
There are systems where the AO-73 and similar decoders fail to decode correctly if
volk_profile
has not been run ever in the system. This seems to be caused
by the Viterbi decoder chosen by Volk by default when there is no
~/.volk/volk_config
file. If problems with these decoders are seen, it
is recommended to run volk_profile
to see if it fixes the problems. Additionally,
it is recommended to check if in ~/.volk/volk_config
there is a line that
contains volk_8u_x4_conv_k7_r2_8u avx2 avx2
and replace both occurences
of avx2
by either spiral
or generic
.
PYTHONPATH
After installing gr-satellites, it is necessary to ensure that Python is able
to locate the gr-satellites Python module. Depending on the configuration of
Python and the location where gr-satellites has been installed, it might be
necessary to set the PYTHONPATH
environment variable.
If Python is not able to locate the gr-satellites module, it will produce an error like this:
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'satellites'
Often, gr-satellites is installed into /usr/local/lib/python3/dist-packages/
or a similar directory, in a subdirectory called satellites
. Therefore,
$ export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python3/dist-packages/
can be used to allow Python to find the gr-satellites module. More information
about the PYTHONPATH
can be found in Python’s documentation description of
the PYTHONPATH.
Note
A permanent configuration of the PYTHONPATH
can be added to a script such as
~/.bashrc
or ~/.bash_profile
. This applies the correct
PYTHONPATH
when gr_satellites
or gnuradio-companion
are run from
a bash
session. If gnuradio-companion
is run directly from the
graphical environment, then it is necessary to set the PYTHONPATH
in
xinitrc or xprofile. See the
Arch Linux documentation on environment variables
for more information,
Downloading sample recordings
The satellite-recordings/
directory is a git submodule that contains many
short sample recordings of different satellites that can be used to test the
decoders. From a clone of the gr-satellites git repository, the submodule can
be cloned (downloaded) by running
$ git submodule update --init
inside the gr-satellites/
directory.
Alternatively, it is possible to run
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/daniestevez/gr-satellites
when cloning the gr-satellites repository to download both gr-satellites and the satellite-recordings submodule.
The satellite-recordings sample recordings can also be downloaded from its own git repository, which is necessary if gr-satellite has not been installed from the git repository.