SatNOGS Wins the 2014 Hackaday Prize For Satellite Networked Open Ground Station

szczys writes SatNOGS has won the 2014 Hackaday Prize. The team of developers designed a satellite ground station which can be built with available tools, commodity parts, and modest skills. Data from each station can be shared via a networked protocol to benefit a much wider swath of humanity than one station could otherwise accomplish.

Comments

My 555 timer based cure for cancer should have won

[Obscene_CNN]

My 555 timer based cure for cancer should have won. Go ahead and call me a sore loser.

Lamest One

[Anonymous Coward]

Llama llama llama. This one was the worst of the 5. How many of us have satellites?

Re:Lamest One

[Teancum]

Ever hear of nanosats? Mere mortals can buy them even and put them into orbit (certainly a modest kickstarter campaign can get one built).

There is also the OSCAR series of amateur radio satellites that are generally available if you have qualifications as a ham radio operator.

Or for that matter, perhaps you want to watch the X-37B that the U.S. Air Force has sent up to try and figure out what they are doing?

In other words, there are plenty of applications for this kind of technology, especially if it was cheap enough to build that small "hacker" teams could pool resources and make it happen.

Re:Lamest One

[Anonymous Coward]

Every single one of the other 5 finalists could be used by more hobbyists, for cheaper than that project. Too exclusive. Want to do ham stuff? How about the SDR one? Like crypto? Chipwhisper can be built for cheaper than the cheapest satellite. The raman spectrometer? Tons of people could use one of these and it's dirt cheap. Open source tricorder? That one was kinda boring, but still, accessible, and I'm sure someone would do something interesting.

SatNOGS? Exclusive to a very very small group of people relative to the others. Not a good choice.

Re:Lamest One

[thegarbz]

Exclusive to a very very small group of people relative to the others. Not a good choice.

This is the quote right here. Yes the concept is great but lets face it what won here was a small niche concept (networked satellite monitoring) in a small niche part (tracking satellites) of an already small subset (RF / Ham) of the hacking community.

I won't see people running out to build these.

Re:Lamest One

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it caters for an even *smaller* niche, specifically the intersection of the groups you highlighted and those who are too incompetent to put together their own station.

That said it does look like a nicely integrated system, though this comes at a price - no real filtering on the RF input (big problem for the 138 MHz band in particular), limited to using the crappy LNA on the sdr, etc.

Re:Lamest One

[gl4ss]

all uses which have less practical use for me than 99% of hackaday posts. which is quite an accomplishment!

and you would think that amateur sats that already have goal of making received data available are already making said data available?

if I were to build one or two of the projects, this one would be the last on the list.

but it's SPACE! and the prize is space! .. I seriously don't get the rationale behind awarding them the first prize.

sure, it's cheap to build, but also the one with least uses.

Re:Lamest One

[Anonymous Coward]

> least uses

Eh? seriously, do you have any other alternative and cheaper off-the-grid terminal for weather data coming from satellites?

Re:Lamest One

[Mikkeles]

The sour grapes is strong in this one.

Way TOO MANY COOKS!

[Anonymous Coward]

https://imgur.com/a/h9qHb/nosc...

YYYYESSSS!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, just, yes.

And?

[Anonymous Coward]

But is the winner going to space?

Typical for hackaday

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they cover important projects and some of the projects they host are amazing. That said, I think their selection system and even the 'celebrity' judges all kind of were bent on finding something novel more than useful or revolutionary. The hackaday journalists are notorious for not understanding what they cover or get over excited by so so tech or non-economical or copycat projects.

Montenegro Sverige live stream

[weiche]

http://montenegrosverigelivest... se mathcen gratis!

old news to us

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds a lot like what we in radio/TV have to do everyday with the budgets we have.

Which Carrier

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder which commercial space carrier he will choose to go to space... I'd personally take the money!

This reminds me of something.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember seeing something similar to this from the South Appellation Space Agency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Really, no surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw all the finalist videos, then the 'basic judging criterea' and thought, "oh, so satnogs is going to win."

        --Is the entry a connected device and is that “connectedness” meaningful to the function?

the other entries seem like nice things to do/make/use alone.
satnogs will bring together lots of people from all over, or else it wont even exist.
they didn't just make a device, they are creating a network. ...wow

Re:My 555 timer based cure for cancer should have

[Anonymous Coward]

There was no such submission.

DUP! Already posted last week...

[Anonymous Coward]

DUP! Already posted last week...