 So good evening, I'm Nico, I'm part of the Libre Space Foundation and today I'll talk about SADNOX, one of our main projects, a crowdsourced satellite operations network, and starting off just a few words about who we are and what we do. So as I said I'm a member of Libre Space Foundation. Libre Space Foundation is an organization we launched actually for backing up SADNOX and we started that about four years ago. So we're all in the foundation pretty much free software activists, we have the background of contributing to open source and free software communities for many years now and we believe that the value of free software and open source should be applied to any field and space included. So we try to push the boundaries of open source to the final frontier, to the space. So we started as I said four years ago from a local Hague space in Athens, Greece. It's a Hague space that it's a physical space so it works like any Hague space, I guess you've been to a lot of them. So it's a physical space that gathers a diverse community with various skill sets. We have people that are software developers, we have people that are radiometers, space enthusiasts, mechanical engineers, so on. So this physical space gave us the opportunity that it gathered in one place many people with different background and different skill set and as you can see along the talk, SADNOX is a project that actually utilized many different skill sets and many different kind of people. So back in 2014, a few months after we started the project, we won the Hackaday Prize which was, as far as I remember, the first Hackaday contest. So we won the prize for the SADNOX and that was a very significant moment for us because the prize was a big funding channel for us so it helped us grow the project but it also made the project very well known outside the boundaries of Greece and although we started from our local Hague spaces, from a local Hague space, today the project is global. We have contributors all over Europe, Australia, the United States, you will see later on we have ground stations very much in many continents. So why did we do this project? So you know that out there there are thousands of satellites, most of them are nano satellites like this one here and nobody is listening to them, nobody is communicating with them. There are so many satellites and so many teams and Hague spaces and academia who build satellites, who launch them, who put them in orbit but they don't actually talk to them. Especially in the nano satellites category we know that this is a huge area, we know that there are many satellites launched every year only in, if we see this graph for instance, only this year alone around 400 to 400 new cubes that have been announced that will be launched and put in orbit alone. So all of these teams put a lot of effort and a lot of money in some cases to build their satellites, to put them in orbit and sometimes they don't put the same kind of effort and the same level of effort to build a ground station to communicate with a satellite or just listen to the satellite when it's up there. And that of course it's a task that it's not, well it's not easy and doesn't scale. I mean imagine if 500 different teams around the world were building 500 different ground stations just for their own satellite, just to wait for that moment in the day that their satellite passes over the head just to listen to it. So the idea we had back then was what if we try to create a network, what if we try to apply the open source mindset to the ground station area. So built a decentralized crowd source network of ground stations and somehow these ground stations can manage globally and also be, transmit back the data to a global management place. So for instance if I am a satellite operator in Brussels I can utilize a ground station in the other end of the world and listen to my satellite. So use a ground station that is not built by me, it's not owned by me. We'll dive more into the technicalities of the project but this is a high level image of what network actually means. So we have the users where the users could be as I said satellite operators but they also could be pretty much anyone. It can be people who just like to listen to satellites or radiometers and so on. Using a global management network they can utilize the ground stations that are scattered around the world and these ground stations then observe, listen to the satellite or communicate with the satellite and get the data back to the users. So in order to do that we try to actually make the project as modular as possible. The idea was that many of the building blocks of the project maybe were already out there. So many people have already ground stations but not in a network fashion or other people may have want to use their own Linux laptop or use a GPD or any other software to listen to satellites. So we try to build the project as modular as possible so you don't have to use all the building blocks in order to participate in the network. We also try to use, not to reinvent the wheel and use as many officers' projects and libraries are out there that make our life easier and whenever there was something missing we actually built it. So this is a graph that shows the building blocks of the entire project and we dive more into the more big blocks of that diagram. So in high level this is the five most important building blocks of the project, the network, the client, the rotator, the antennas and the DB. So starting from the rotator you can see one right here. We try to not just to build everything open source and open hardware but it was important for us to also be accessible and cheap to anyone. So all the parts of the rotator are things that you cannot either 3D print or you can easily buy very cheap in a store. And that's at least for me personally it's also one of the most important things about Opertures that it actually removes barriers for people to participate. But as I said the project is modular so if you don't want to build your own ground station, if you already have a ground station, the project supports any rotator that is supported by Humblip and a lot of CTLB. As I said we wanted to make the rotator and all the building blocks of the project accessible so we try to keep the documentation as up to date as possible and in the hardware side of things. We try to have documentation that guides you through the process of building a ground station step by step. We have our own OHI instance. OHI for those of you who don't know it, it's a hardware documentation platform built by Elabsbot. It's an open source web application where you can see step by step and with photos how to actually build all the parts that you see in the rotator here and assemble it to create a rotator. It's also important to emphasize that in order for a rotator to be accessible, it's not enough just to be on the hardware, it's just enough to put the schematics out there. It was also important for us to try to use open source toolchain so it's easy for people to contribute but also to design their own modifications and so on. So we try to use open source tools in the entire process and that can mean there can be CAD software to design, key CAD here, QCAD and in the end to produce our own hardware in a fully open source way. And also to be easy for people in hockey spaces and universities to follow the documentation through without any need to pay any license or any other cost. So the ground station is not just the rotator, the ground station also needs some kind of software to run it in order to do the observations and the data and so on. Our reference platform is Raspberry Pi and an RTL-SDR but as I said it's modular so someone may use something completely different, you may use a node droid, you may use a big bone or you may use a Linux laptop. And it works with any SDR that's supported by ZR Osmo SDR and as I said any Linux platform as long as you can run Python and GNU radio unit. So you can see in the photo for instance a small box of a ground station with Raspberry Pi and so on. It's really small and portable. And Raspberry Pi 3 being our reference platform so what we provide is also as I said we use open source tools too. So we utilize the power of GitLab, the power of GitLab CI specifically to actually, and Ansible to actually provide to build, to do nightly builds of the software that runs on the ground station and to build the Raspberry Pi with everything prepared and all you have to do then is just to run a small configuration script and the ground station is ready to go. So we have many variations of ground stations from contributors around the world. Not everyone follows the same design or doesn't necessarily follow our reference or our reference designs. These are all ground stations that are currently hooked in the network from United States, from Australia, from Denmark, Greece. And as you can see for instance down here it's in Copenhagen there's a ground station that doesn't have a rotator. That's a very simple setup with no rotator at all just specific antenna. And these ground stations are as I said all over the world. I'll get to the network side of things in a bit but as you can see we're very geographically spread. So going back to the I mean living for a moment of the of the ground level and going to the cloud sort of speak side of things. This is the SADNOX DB. This is probably the the sub project of SADNOX that it has it has a ability that it's beyond SADNOX itself. So when we started the project we realized that there's no one center place to find information about satellites. Frequencies for instance the most important thing. And the only way to find info about satellites was actually to just browse blogs and a radiometer websites and try to to figure out which transmitters have its audit satellite. So what we did as we did with a whole project we launched the website that works in a cultures way where people submit suggestions about satellites to know about. They can be that they are the satellite operators so they know what the satellite actually what frequencies actually has or other people that have that information. And we gather this all this data in one place so you can easily see how you can easily see satellite some basic information about them and the frequencies they support what's the status and so on. In the process of building DB we also expanded its scope and started to also make it usable to other cases. Well first of all let me say that DB has an API so it's pretty much an open data portal so everything that's on DB can be consumed by an API and that was really important for us. But also the API is it's a doorstep for people who don't use our ground stations who don't use our network but are still doing observations for satellites to somehow submit road data of observations out to the world. So right now our API supports besides our own software it also supports third party software like Gpredict or TLM for Word and so on. When I when I wrote the slides we had about 10 million frames for 80 satellites probably it's more now. And in general we have about 300 satellites on this website with detailed information. And what we do with this with all this data that we try to what some satellites we know for some satellites they have a specific specification of how they construct their binary data. So we write decoders for them we try to decode the data and so to display the telemetry information about the satellites. We did that for them for our own satellite. I would do that for other satellites depending on how much knowledge we have for specific satellite and from time to time we will cooperate with satellite operators to give us that kind of information. And the idea here is that eventually we want to build some telemetry dashboards for this information so that it's easy for people satellite operators or any other person out there to easily look at the data in a form that it's human readable not just binary data but actually readable data. So let's go to the network of satellites this is the main orchestration platform of the whole network. This is the place where you go if you want to make observations to see the data that other people have gathered from observations so on. So network has the primary functionality of scheduling observations and that can happen in two ways. First of all the satellite operators themselves can go on the website and let's say they want to listen to their satellite for the next five hours so they can see which ground stations are available in this time frame and schedule this observation in the future. But also for people who are just curious or with their right deometry of space enthusiasts they can have their own ground station there and they can go on their own ground station and say for instance in the next five hours which satellites I can hear and then schedule these observations in the future. So when the observation happens in the end and the ground station the ground station then posts that back the data back to the network and you can actually see and hack with the data. So what is this data? As I say here waterfall the modulated audio and the modulated data what this means. I have some screenshots so you have a more visual image of the network so here for instance is the view where someone can schedule an observation so here we for instance we have picked NOAA 19 a weather satellite and we can see that there are two ground stations that have an observation window free for this specific satellite for this specific time frame and for that specific frequency. And here is the other view I talked about here is a specific ground station, a random example from Slavbat where we can see what are the next satellite passes above this specific ground station and you can easily schedule observations. Also you can see here that before you actually schedule an observation you can see some metadata about it so you actually know if that pass is a good pass or maybe it's too low and it doesn't worth to schedule it so on. And this is how the observation looks when it's actually done and the ground station has pushed the data back to the network. So this is the audio with a spectogram so you can have a more visual representation of the audio and on the bottom you can see the TLE the orbital data that was used for that specific observation which I had to keep we keep TLE for per observation so historically you can easily know which TLE was used for any given observation and on the left you can see the same metadata we saw before so you can see what time frame was what was specific properties of this or satellite pass. And on the left we have a standard waterfall of the observations so you can have a quick look on the observation and on the right this is a weather satellite so where the satellites send back images so photograph so here we have the NOAA satellite posting back an image. So one of the challenges we had when we when the network grow at the moment we have about 20 ground stations in production and fully functional around the world and we have about 50 satellites that are in testing mode and about to get in production so one of the challenges we have besides scaling all this infrastructure was also the challenge of storage so the audio for instance is 50 to 60 megabytes per observation and of course we want to keep all observations forever that's the point even observations that are not perfect so we had the challenge of where do we store all this data and here we utilize the power of open data as I said all the data are in an open license and distributed freely so what best to use a already available public infrastructure for storing open data so we wrote some code to actually utilize archive.org API which is S3 compatible API to upload that at least for now just the audio files of the observations to archive.org at the moment I think we have around 60k of audio data to archive.org which is about two terabytes so coming back to the ground station side of things as I said I show the physical side of the ground station the rotator like here and the box with the Raspberry Pi and the SDR but inside the Raspberry Pi we have some software that does all the things necessary to do the actual observation so what the client software does is it gives the necessary commands to the rotator collects the schedule the future schedule the observations for the network API and adjust the frequency for doubler correction and then when the observation ends it generates the data that water for the audio and pushes the data back to the network so we have we have as I said we can easily client is part of the Raspberry Pi image so you may not have to actually install it on its own as a standalone but you can download it and install it on your laptop and it also comes with a web interface so it's easily it's easy to see some logs without having to SSH the Raspberry Pi and to do some very basic configuration from there so here is the web interface of the of the client of the software that runs on the ground station so imagine that you have a ground station like that on your rooftop then the only thing you have to do is power it up do some very basic configuration and then opening a local host port on your laptop and see that web interface you can see for instance here that that specific ground station has four scheduled observations in the future and on the bottom you can see some real-time logs of what's happening in the Raspberry Pi also on the top right of the screen you can see there's a drop-down menu for choosing between network mode and standalone mode when it's network mode it means that the ground station is part of the global network but for many people it's important to also have the ability to put their ground station in offline mode in a standalone mode so they can do observations without actually under pushing the data back network or even not pulling observations from them and that's also a part of the sub system of the web interface where for our own satellite we build our own web interface on the client for command and control you can listen more about that in the next presentation so how we can contribute to the project as I said it's a modular project has many building blocks and there are many different areas where people can contribute we're in developers meetup so you can write code for the for the project the languages we use depend on the specific part of the project so most parts of our software is usually Python but we also have some bits of CNC plus plus you can contribute of course with other ways we will also are in need for mechanical engineers or electronic designs designers and you can also help with automating things testing stuff like that and we always want people to try especially on the ground station level to try with the Raspberry Pi to flash it to see problems and get back to us and of course why not build the ground station on your own it's not that difficult I'm a software developer and I have my own ground station in my rooftop so how hard can it be so thank you thank you very much we've got plenty of time for question and answers now so if you've got a question just raise your hand and we will come to your place with the microphone up there Hi excellent presentation is there any IP associated with the data beam by the satellites down to you are you free to redistribute it as you said with an open content license can you speak a bit louder yes is there any intellectual property are there any intellectual property rights associated with the data by the satellite launchers understand that you make them freely available but are there any rights associated with the data as they are being down from the satellite if I can correctly you're asking about the data intellectual property rights of the data from the satellites from the satellites yeah right now as I said we we do it in an open data fashion so all the data that are coming from the observations and are posted to the network we're using creative commons license so it's easy for people to actually manipulate the data and do whatever they want with them what about the generators of the data so the satellite owners launchers do they make the data available in that fashion the method of the subject to be for instance you know the data of the satellites the primary data generated by the satellites what all the data that comes to us at least it's we redistributed them in an open license and I didn't mention that most of the satellites were target are in the low earth orbit and most of them are using amateur bands so the transmissions are open and it's okay for everyone to listen and that's why we also redistributed them in open license thank you hello thank you for the presentation I wondered about the data that satellites are sending back again you showed some of the binary data earlier and showed some of the weather satellite pictures how much of the data are you able to decode I'm sure I can't hear you at all how much of the data you get back from the satellites are you able to decode or as much of it unknown how much of the data will get back of the satellite yes how can you decode the data how much of it you're able to decode so I can't hear you very well but if I got the question right how much of the data we get from the satellite we can decode or yes do you know what the data means or yeah well that depends yeah that depends on how much information we have from this for the specific satellite so in some cases it's really easy because it's well known satellites like I showed the example of a weather satellite in some cases we know the satellite operators or for instance for our own satellite so we know the spec that this specific satellite is using and we know how to decode this data but that's an ongoing process I mean we try to have us close cooperation as possible with satellite operators because it's not it's not sure that all the satellites use similar kind of specs for their data my question would be other any regulated limitation in the frequencies so can you collect the data everywhere on all the frequencies or there are some limitations and how do you implement those limitations so the data we collect are collected by ground stations so the bands that the frequencies that you support is what the ground station supports so depending on the antennas you have you can hear the specific frequency you have a UHF antenna you can use the UHF band so it's allowed to collect data in those countries on those frequencies yeah I mean it's a it's a radiometer frequency so in most countries at least in Europe it's legal so it depends on the country but in general yeah if it's an amateur advanced it's legal so are there any more questions okay how do you interact with commercial stations from satellites is there a connection commercial ground stations you mean how I mean we don't have so that the ground stations that are we don't offer a commercial package that's what you're asking I mean the network is right now anyone who has a ground station on the network can schedule an observation that's the the model we have right now at least to use it as an incentive for people to build ground stations so we in order to schedule ground station in order to schedule observation you don't have to pay you don't have to rent a time slot on specific ground stations and so on as it may happen in commercial in commercial examples but yeah the ground station the observations are also public so there's no commercial aspect of the network at this point and we don't intend to you said earlier in your talk that people shoot satellites into space and then don't use them why the hell is that what happens can you repeat you said it early in the early parts of your talk that people shoot satellites into space but then don't use them don't listen to them why are people doing that well as I said first of all in the rush to try to build a satellite sometimes you don't consider the ground station part very important so you don't put much effort to that and also there are cases where even if you build the ground station you just have to wait for your satellite to pass over your head and that could be one or two per day on if you're very alike it may be never because of the orbit so sometimes it happens I mean there are so many satellites out there and they're not so many ground stations are there any more questions yeah I can see that you've got lots not so the ground stations in Europe and maybe some in America are there any parts of the world's where you specifically would like to have new ground stations because your coverage is patchy yeah well in general the more the better I mean even in places where we already have a ground station it's important to have more ground stations so we can catch as many satellites as possible but if you look at the map I saw earlier that's actually from the I think that's from the this also includes satellite ground stations that are in testing mode but you can see that we lack some ground stations for instance in Africa or in near the equator and so on so and in North Asia Russia for instance but we also surprisingly although you can see that Europe is full of ground stations I think we don't have many ground stations in the central Europe we don't have in Germany or in France ground station at the moment or even in Belgium so if you want to to contribute in that way that would be very helpful. Are there any more questions just to wave your hand then? Okay doesn't seem so so thank you very much for your talk.