Satellite Receive Station with RTL-SDR and Raspberry Pi
Unfortunately the blog referenced in this post is now gone. We have changed all links to ones archived by archive.org.
Over on the carpcomm blog, the author has posted a how to guide on building a remote satellite receive station using the Raspberry Pi and a $20 rtl-sdr dongle or funcube. He uses his own opensource CarpSD software which allows the station to be accessed directly via the web.
Space and satellites are something that only few people are fortunate enough to interact with. However, this is starting to change due to the rapid growth in capability of consumer electronics. In fact, you can receive and decode transmissions from satellites using only a Raspberry Pi, a USB software-defined radio receiver, and a few other cheap parts.
For the software, we'll use the CarpSD ground station control software. It's an open-source program with the source hosted on GitHub. It runs as a background process and connects to the Carpcomm server, so that you can control your station from the Carpcomm website. Thus, there is no need to connect a display to your Raspberry Pi and you can leave your station running continuously in the background. The instructions below can be executed entirely over SSH.
Check out the rest of his post here.
