Profile: satellite¶
Tracking, working and decoding amateur and weather satellites
Stage: 1.0
Who it is for¶
An operator who wants to predict passes, follow them with Doppler correction, or decode a weather satellite.
At a glance¶
| Stage | 1.0 |
| Units | 4 |
| Disk | about 400 MB, double without GNU Radio |
| Hardware | An SDR and an antenna for receiving, or a transceiver for working amateur satellites. Pass prediction needs no hardware. |
| Consent | none |
| Install | hammunition install satellite |
What it installs¶
A tracker that predicts passes and drives a rotator and radio through hamlib, a large collection of telemetry decoders as GNU Radio blocks, and SatDump for turning a weather-satellite pass into an image. Hamlib's command-line tools come along because Doppler correction is what makes the difference between chasing a signal across the band and staying on it, and that runs through rigctld.
Disk footprint: Around 400 MB. SatDump and gr-satellites carry most of it; gr-satellites pulls the whole GNU Radio stack if it is not already present, which roughly doubles the figure on a fresh machine.
Why these belong together¶
A satellite pass is one activity with three parts: know when it is, follow it while it happens, and make sense of what came down. Nothing here is useful without the other two. It is a small profile because it is a well-defined job.
Packages (4)¶
gpredict, gr-satellites, satdump, libhamlib-utils
What it deliberately excludes¶
The APT weather-satellite decoders. noaa-apt and xwxapt are in this catalog and in the AHRL inventory, and both are RETIRE'd for the same reason: every NOAA APT satellite went out of service on 2025-11-09. SatDump covers what is still transmitting, and the retired entries stay in the catalog with their provenance rather than vanishing. FoxTelem is also absent — decoding AMSAT Fox telemetry is only worth it if enough of that constellation is still alive, which nobody here has checked.
Install it¶
Read the plan first. It changes nothing and prints every package, build, file and system change, and every consent gate you will meet:
Then do it. The engine asks for your sudo password once, near the start,
and shows the same plan again before it asks you to confirm:
A member your machine cannot take is deferred by name and the rest installs (D-039); the plan lists each under Will NOT happen, with the reason and the command that fixes it. Installation explains how to read every part of the plan.
What you configure by hand afterward¶
Keplerian elements go stale in days, not months, and gpredict computes from whatever it last downloaded without warning you. Update them before relying on a prediction; that is the single most common cause of a pass that does not happen when predicted. Set your own location accurately — every prediction is relative to it. Rotator and radio control need hamlib reaching the hardware and rigctld running, which is a step that is easy to miss.
Your first ten minutes¶
- Set your grid square:
hammunition station set --callsign N0CALL --grid-square FN31pr. The plan writes gpredict's ground-station file from it, and says so under Configuration that will be written. - Read the plan:
hammunition install satellite --dry-run. If you have not named a radio, gpredict's rig file is listed under Will NOT happen; that is expected. - Install:
hammunition install satellite. - Open gpredict and update the orbital elements (Edit, Update TLE, From network) before you trust a single prediction. Elements go stale in days.
- Confirm your location in gpredict's preferences. Every pass time is relative to it.
- Pick a bright pass and watch it in the polar view. Satellites covers Doppler through
rigctld, weather pictures with SatDump and telemetry with gr-satellites.
Take it off again¶
This removes what Hammunition itself installed and nothing else. It does not remove dependencies apt pulled in, group memberships or configuration files it wrote; the plan says so and the transaction log records them (D-004).