Articles

Articles

This article is more or less a follow up to the previous one about 2.0.0. Summary For the short version, as explained in the previous article v2.0.0 Alpha builds will start being rolled out until things are stable enough for an actual release. In the meantime, most users are encourage to switch over as v1.2.x is now officially being superseeded. However, do note that for some workflows, upgrading may be not an option yet (and if so, please report everything missing!). Please check…

This article was written by lego11 and originally published on his website, www.a-centauri.com. We decided to publish it here to give it the widest circulation possible, for the best interests of the satellite community. After the eventual decommissioning of the last POES satellite (NOAA-15, known as The King), many satellite amateurs are worried about the end of the hobby, given the apparent lack of satellites to receive imagery from. However, this is far from the truth! Here are a few…

Introduction It's been a while since the last release, especially right after 1.2.2 where we said we would instead pace things up on releases (especially with most people using nightly builds nowadays), so what happened? Some SatDump History To explain what happened, it's useful to first remember the history of SatDump as a project especially since the userbase has changed a lot since those early times. Do note that this of course is heavily summarized. Back around 2019, I (Aang23…

We are back with a very fresh SatDump version (given the incoming winter, it better be!), almost exactly a month after the last release! We are now maintaining a quicker paced release cycle to avoid users relying too much on unstable nightly builds that can break at any moment. We hope you appreciate this choice! New Features HIRS Calibration Available HIRS (High-resolution InfraRed Sounder) is an instrument flown on NOAA-15, NOAA-18, NOAA-19 and Metop B. It is a 19-channel infrared…

Once again, what was supposed to be a quick wait before a new version has unfortunately turned a many months wait. But that's done now and you'll be able to enjoy these new features, and there are a lot of them! New Features Meteor-M Calibration Available After a very long time and many struggles (including a very annoying language issue that kept us stuck for days - more on that later) we are very proud to announce infrared calibration for Meteor-M satellites on HRPT and LRPT. This…

Uh oh, it looks like we got a little out-of-control again and changed... well, we changed a lot in SatDump. But never fear, this update contains a lot of great features that many of our users will appreciate - whether you are an amateur, or work in the professional space. Please note, this is a major update from 1.1.4 - many internal systems have been reworked, and new products may not load in older versions. Saved products might be arranged differently, and there are compatibility…

It might still be winter, but that hasn't cooled down SatDump's pace of development! We're happy to announce version 1.1.4, full of new features and bug fixes. New Features Autotrack/Scheduler improvements The most notable change this time around are the improvments to the autotrack/scheduler functionality. Previously, SatDump the scheduler could only decode one downlink at a time. This was a problem: what if you have an omnidirectional antenna and there are multiple satellites in the…

New Year, New SatDump! We're happy to announce a new version of SatDump with several added features and even more bug fixes. New Features NOAA APT improvements This release brings a large number of changes to NOAA APT. One major change is that SatDump now identifies the channels you are receiving on APT. Instead of simply seeing Channel A/Channel B, each side of the transmission is identified as Channel 1, 2, 3b, 4, or 5. Additionally, and more importantly: NOAA APT data is now…

Yet another update has been beamed to your computers now! This time starring: New features Automation improvements It is now possible to very easily build an automated station for APT or LRPT satellites, advantageously replacing previous setups that required anywhere from 5 to 12 separate pieces of software. lego11 has made a detailed configuration guide for such a station. Later, additional features such as simultaneous reception of NOAA APT and DSB, or LRPT and APT, are planned. A…

Guess what, it's update time again! Time GOES(-15) by so fast - it's been a month now since V1.1.0 was released (See what we did there?). So we figured a small maintenance update will do no harm, to get you amazing folks some more features! New features Better projections Aang23 made some overtime and implemented a new projection algorithm to finally replace the old and crusty pre-1.0.0 algorithm. He made a fantastic writeup [here] that is definitely worth checking out. Don't worry, the…

One of SatDump's major components is projections. Geo-referencing satellite data, especially when it's not in GEO requires quite a few convoluted processing steps. Considering one recent set of changes involved greatly improving the entire projection system's internals, I thought it would be a good idea to do a little article explaining the entire process in details, especially since this not something I have seen documented in any "simpler" way when I was doing research at…

It's been 285 days since SatDump 1.0.3 was released. A lot has changed since then - new features have been added and numerous bugs were squished! That's why we decided to finally release SatDump version 1.1.0. Why 1.1.0? Back when we started SatDump, we decided on using a versioning system that actually meant something. You might be wondering, how does it work? Why is it possible to get 1.1.0 and up before they are released? How does it work? It's actually rather simple: the version…

It initially wasn't planned to release 1.0.3 so soon, I still had some other plans. But with the amount of requests following JPSS-2's VIIRS instrument now being active, APT support and so on... I guess it's time. Added features NOAA APT Support As I said in my initial announcement of this feature... Ironically APT was by far one of the most requested downlinks to be supported. Well, support has been implemented down to the ability to project the imagery like many others satellites.…

A rather quick update after 1.0.1. There were some major bugs that were worked on since, so a rather quick release before working on other things felt important. So obviously, this is mainly bugfix... Added features AVHRR Channel 3A/B (by Zbychu) Until now, channel 3A and 3B were not being separated on AVHRR/3 data. In view of other upcoming features/changes, they are now being split according to the configuration downlinked by the satellite. Composites were modified to account for…

This update, unlike previous ones, includes a lot that's more under-the-hood... So while it will appear smaller, it isn't especially that much smaller! Things that are still too WIP to be mentioned, or not relevant anymore will not be mentioned (eg, BlueWalker-3 being encrypted). Added features FengYun-4 A/B LRIT/HRIT While the downlink themselves could already be processed down to CADUs, imagery was not yet decoded due to quite a few quirks that took a while to figure out (see…

Introduction For a while now, the BlueWalker-3 has been continuously monitored by amateurs worldwide including myself due to it's very controversial nature (won't go in details about it here. See Scott Tilley's posts of the topic), both optically and on UHF/S-Band. Daniel Estévez published a first analysis of the UHF downlink back in September, and later of the S-Band downlink. Both downlinks were quite quite stange. But about a week ago, likely due to the incoming deployment at…

Well, after a bit over a month... It's probably about time to release 1.0.0 officially (NOT in alpha/beta status anymore! So, the following releases with go back to the regular naming scheme, so 1.0.1, 1.0.2, etc). Of course, quite a lot has been done and fixed in the meantime. Do note only major changes are listed here. A lot more did change, but listing every small change is not quite possible! Added features Favourite pipelines (by Zbychu) Despite the search system, finding the…

It's exactly one week since the "rework", or 1.0.0 was released publicly as an Alpha. As promised, today a new official release is being released. This release is for 1.0.0 Beta, or the second (and normally) last test public release until an official 1.0.0 release is made, most likely again in about a week. Making it an Alpha release initially had the sole intent to make it clear that despite all the work that has been put into it, things have not gone through public scrutiny…

We've noticed that the UI after the rework (even though we think is pretty clean) can be quite confusing to many people. That's why I've have decided to write this post in which I explain some basic features of SatDump and how to use them efficiently! UI First Start When you launch satdump-ui you are greeted with a GUI window. The main way of navigating in it is the Tab Bar on the top [1]. Using that you can switch between the different tools SatDump has to offer. The UI of each tool is…

First of all, why? Back when I started SatDump, it started as a "simple" UI to simplify the process of using the previous command-line tools (ironically, that's why I initially went with the module system). It wasn't meant to be too complicated at the time, so I kept some things pretty basic, and it initially was mostly a 1:1 port of the old codebase. But soon after, I started adding features, rewriting a bunch of code, supporting more and more satellites. At the same time,…