L-Band Success Philippines. Thank you Outernet

Philippines now has the Outernet L-Band goodness arriving by Satellite.

Well done Outernet.

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First Impressions of Outernet DIY Receiver kit.

The Outernet team is dynamic to deal with and exciting in their enthusiasm, ability and rate of achievement to goal.

On the basis of sending data from space for under $100 for a DIY hardware kit. I give them 10 out of 10.

The CHIP $9.00 computer just works great. Its really Cute and appears ideal, cheap, small, low powered and capable of running up to 4 users in the Outernet Librarian WiFi hot-spot. I would not buy anything else.

It does though need a powered hub to run the RTL E4000 dongle. (This may change in later software revisions). Not a big deal for now as It lets me put the antenna and E4000 dongle outside by running a long USB cable from the powered hub.

The CHIP Computer was very complex to Flash and as for now there is no way to use the Chrome Browser plugin provided by CHIP to flash an alternate OS onto the CHIP. Instead you have to set up a Ubuntu computer to create a environment to flash the CHIP. It took my friend Larry about and hour to do this for me on Ubuntu. (I am certain this flashing of The CHIP computer with the Outernet OS will be resolved soon)

One solution is CHIP or Outernet could just sell the CHIP already flashed.

The other option is to get a Raspberry PI and use the Raspberry Pi Outernet software but that is much more expensive option than the CHIP computer.

My CHIP came with the Video out TV Cable. Make sure you buy this extra in case you want to see your chip on a TV in VGA . (It is not needed to run the Outernet OS but it helped when we were initially testing the CHIP when it arrived.)

The Chip Outernet beta Librarian software looks and feels great. It already looks like a finished product.

Files started coming down as soon as I turned the unit on. I got about 8db signal and no errors. Outernet says it is getting a through put of about 1 Mb a hour.

The $19.00 Nooelec filter is amazing and works incredibly well. It complements the E4000 RTL dongle which from my simple playing with on Linux GQRX works really well. (I love GQRX it is such an awesome program for RTL dongle hacking)

The stand alone L-Band Antenna works really well but I think will have to be sold with a optional water-proof housing. In the Philippines I am able to lay my antenna flat and get a 8db signal from the Inmarsat 4F1 above New Guinea. According to Outernet the receiver needs at least a 4db signal for the decoder to work error free.

Well done Outernet. I absolutely recommend getting the DIY KIT.

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Great stuff, just out of curiosity what are the Tumblr images?

Great stuff, just out of curiosity what are the Tumblr images?

They appear to be blank?

I am curious as to why.

But the system is downloading and I am happy to have a working prototype , all be it downloading blank images.

Do the weather images work?

@Seasalt Thanks for putting in the time to make this work. I know it’s not easy (yet).

One thing I wanted to point out is that the real value is not just that we have files being delivered from space. It’s that we are empowering anyone to be a space-broadcaster.

As much as possible, we’d like to get away from selecting the content ourselves. It’s going to be a much more relevant system if both offline and online users are the ones determining the playlist.

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Sam all the images I have downloaded are blank for some reason.

Syed can you please explain the transmission testing process and what we can expect to see in the next 24 hrs to 7 days say.

I have received 41,000 packets in about 15 hrs and a error rate of 37 packets (of which some errors are me moving the antenna etc.)

The downloaded image files do not appear as graphical thumbnails?

Can you enter the following URL and tell me which version of rxOS you are running?

http://librarian.outernet/qa/

A screenshot would be very helpful.

Shoot. That’s an older version. Do you have the Ubuntu flashing environment on your machine? Or was that only on your friend’s?

This is latest test-image, which should have the issue resolved.

Have re-flashed unit.

Asia sat Frequency still not set right

Unit working

The next release will have the corrected channel settings.

Are you receiving files and able to view them? What is the build number when you visit /qa/ ?

The other files should have downloaded by now. Let’s see what happens over the next few hours. The images should show up in the gallery view.

Does Rain effect the SNR as I am getting a low <4 SNR. But it appears to not be effecting the Packet error rate. Nothing has changed with the antenna so The only cause I can assume is that it is stormy weather here and raining.

Sun has come out SNR gone to 10.25. Possible the canopy I had over the antenna got rainwater on it that attenuated the signal.

10 hours, 17,000 packets no files yet .

First Outernet Pictures from space. Groovey