This is a dockerized version of AltiWx, a software-package to decode NOAA and Meteor weathersatellites. The container is based on Debian:bullseye-slim.
This is a software that was made after experimenting around with several automated satellite station solutions, mostly aimed at the NOAA APT and METEOR LRPT transmissions on VHF. Originally software was used, that wrapped around rtl_fm and other tools such as sox, predict, some APT decoder, etc to automatically record and decode passes. It worked great but bothering was the fact, that this same RTL-SDR has 2.4Mhz of usable bandwidth... So in theory the whole VHF weather band can fit right? And that's how the idea started.
AltiWx is an automated satellite station recording software built from the ground up for that purpose, with integrated DSP, pass prediction and processing mechanism. Recording is done by monitoring a whole portion of the spectrum, and by some digital signal processing, isolate each signal from this whole sampled spectrum to allow recording as many satellites (or downlinks) in parrallel as you want as long as long as they fit in the bandwidth of your SDR!
Obviously, this brought up a few issues such as how to properly handle passes of satellites that do not fit in the bandwidth... In the end it will prioritize better passes (or satellite priorities set in the configuration file) per-band as doable.
In fact, AltiWx will only ever tune the SDR to some predefined frequency bands in the configuration, as an example let's take 137.5Mhz and 145Mhz at 2.4Mhz bandwidth. With this SDR configuration, you could have NOAA 19, which has both APT on 137.1Mhz and DSB on 137.77Mhz.
Important: If transits of satellites happen at the same time, AltiWx will be able to process all of them and not only one
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/ploeffler/AltiWx-Docker
cd AltiWx-Docker
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/altillimity/AltiWx/master/config.ymlEdit the config.yml file to meet your requirements.
- norad: 33591 # NOAA 19
min_elevation: 10
priority: 1
downlinks:
- name: APT
frequency: 137100000
bandwidth: 42000
doppler: false
post_processing_script: apt-noaa.py
output_extension: wav
type: FM
parameters:
audio_samplerate: 48000
- name: DSB
frequency: 137770000
bandwidth: 48000
doppler: false
post_processing_script: none
output_extension: raw
type: IQ
The post_processing_script can either be:
- apt-noaa.py
- apt-noaa-noaaapt.py
- apt-noaa-wx2img.py
Nevertheless wx2img is not (yet) part of this docker container.
The DSB part can be prost-processed with dsb-noaa.py
- norad: 40069 # METEOR-M 2
min_elevation: 10
priority: 1
downlinks:
- name: LRPT
frequency: 137100000
bandwidth: 140000
doppler: false
post_processing_script: lrpt-meteorm2.py
output_extension: soft
type: QPSK
parameters:
agc_rate: 0.1
symbolrate: 72000
rrc_alpha: 0.6
rrc_taps: 31
costas_bw: 0.005
The post_processing_script can either be:
- lrpt-meteorm2.py
- lrpt-meteorm2-extended.py
- lrpt-meteormn2-satdump.py
- norad: 25544 # ISS
min_elevation: 20
priority: 1
downlinks:
- name: SSTV
frequency: 145800000
bandwidth: 14000
doppler: true
post_processing_script: none
output_extension: wav
type: FM
parameters:
audio_samplerate: 48000
- name: APRS
frequency: 145825000
bandwidth: 12000
doppler: true
post_processing_script: none
output_extension: wav
type: FM
parameters:
audio_samplerate: 48000
(More details on the post-processing-scripts you can find in the sources of AltiWx)
After that having configured we are ready to go. Depending on your platform this will take several minutes:
docker build -t altiwx .
docker run --privileged -v /dev/bus/usb:/dev/bus/usb -v $(pwd)/config.yml:/opt/AltiWx/config.yml --name altiwx --network host -d --restart unless-stopped -v $(pwd)/data:/opt/AltiWx/data -dt altiwx '/opt/AltiWx/AltiWx'(depending on your system you may require to run "sudo docker ..." )