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:

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.