SatNOGS – Hackaday Prize Winner uses RTL-SDR in Design

The popular Hackaday blog recently announced the winner of their grand competition to win a trip to space or $200k. The goal of the competition was to design and build the best example of “an open, connected device”. The winner of the competition is SatNOGS, a system that hopes to enable a low cost network of satellite ground stations thus enabling greater access to satellite data. The radio receiver used in the SatNOGS hardware is a standard RTL2832U R820T RTL-SDR dongle.

The SatNOGS hardware is a system that uses high gain antennas, tracking motors, a RTL-SDR and a PC running GNU Radio and other software to automatically track, receive and record satellites as they pass over head. The open source software works to automatically schedule observations and record them to an online database.

More information about SatNOGS can also be found on their website https://satnogs.org/.

The third prize winner of the Hackaday prize was the ‘PortableSDR’, which we posted about previously.