Chapter 1

Install

Tip

For fast installation: Copy this line and paste it in the shell of your SatNOGS station:

curl -sfL https://satnogs.mhuebner.eu/install.sh | bash -s --

Foreword: Deployment Philosophy

satnogs-client-rs aims to be more easy in installation compared to the standard SatNOGS client. Therefore, some deployment decisions were made:

  • Avoid Ansible: While I found ansible to be an excellent tool for system provision, it certainly needs you to understand it concepts. Most users don’t know these concepts and therefore can’t fix things, if they break (again). This can be highly frustrating to users, which we want to avoid. Instead, we opted for a web-based wizard (see chapter Setup).
  • Do things the Debian way: In my personal opinion, Debian has solved most of the deployment problems, the SatNOGS community is facing, already in a mostly elegant and practical way. Therefore, I opted for Debian packages (.deb) and systemd service units, instead of a single monolithic docker container (which is in fact Debian again, but that’s another story…).
  • Simplicity is key: Installing on top of a standard Debian image should be easy and follow standard procedures practised in other projects too.

Preparations and Overview

I assume that your hardware is the Raspberry Pi based reference ground station as described by the SatNOGS people in the wiki. Other stations (e.g. x86-64 based) should also work though. On that station needs to run a plain Debian 12 (bookworm) or Debian 13 (trixie). Please prepare those images according to the Raspberry Pi Tutorial or another suitable source of your choice.

If you go with raspbian, it’s totally fine to go with the lite-flavour. We don’t need a full desktop environment for driving a satellite station. In fact: What we save in RAM from the Desktop environment, we can use for the actual tasks our satellite station. :)

Installing satnogs-client-rs happens in these general steps:

  • Add the repository for satnogs-flowgraphs to apt sources (DSP-part)
  • Add the repository for satnogs-client-rs to apt sources (The software mentioned in this documentation)
  • Install the new client including its dependencies
Note

While it should™ work, to have the original satnogs client and satnogs-client-rs installed on the same station, I do not recommend this! Especially running at the same time will certainly fail.

Installing the Components on Your Station

Most easy way would be, to copy and paste the command from above into the Raspberry Pi’s shell:

curl -sfL https://satnogs.mhuebner.eu/install.sh | bash -s --

Though very common nowadays (even rustup does this) you should never do that for security reasons. In that script you are loading there, could be literally anything. Best would be, to load the script, have and inspection and afterwards run it:

$ wget https://satnogs.mhuebner.eu/install.sh
$ less install.sh
$ bash install.sh

For reference, you can see the content of this script as it was at 2026-06-22 down below. Please feel encouraged to check by yourself, as I might not update the code in this documentation regularly.

That being said, we can go to the next chapter: Configuring and setting up your station.

Listing of Installation Script

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# ToDo: check, if we really need all those.
packages=" \
    gr-satnogs \
    libaec0 \
    libgfortran5 \
    libgnuradio-satellites5.9.0 \
    libhamlib-utils \
    libhdf5-103-1 \
    libhdf5-dev \
    libhdf5-hl-100 \
    libopenblas0-pthread \
    libsz2 \
    python3-gps \
    python3-h5py \
    python3-hamlib \
    python3-pip \
    python3-virtualenv \
    satnogs-client-rs \
    satnogs-flowgraphs \
    "

log() {
  echo ["$(date "+%F %R:%S")"] "$@"
}

# get Debian version information
source /etc/os-release

satnogs_key_path="/etc/apt/keyrings/satnogs.asc"
satnogs_source_list_path="/etc/apt/sources.list.d/satnogs.list"
satnogs_rs_key_path="/etc/apt/keyrings/satnogs-rs.asc"
satnogs_rs_source_list_path="/etc/apt/sources.list.d/satnogs-rs.list"

#
# ToDo: Check, if we are on a supported debian version
#

if [ "$(lsb_release -is)" != "Debian" ]; then
  log "satnogs-client-rs is only supported on Debian..."
  log "Exiting..."
  exit 1
fi

case "$(lsb_release -rs)" in
  12) log "Debian 12 detected..."
  ;;
  13) log "Debian 13 detected..."
  ;;
  *) log "Your Debian version is not supported. Supported versions are 12 and 13."
  ;;
esac

log "This script needs root privileges. If you are ask for those, please enter your password.
Waiting for 5 seconds...
"
sleep 5

log "Adding satnogs repo (flowgraphs)"
#
# Satnogs Repo
#
sudo wget https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:librespace:satnogs-unstable2/Debian_"${VERSION_ID}"/Release.key -O "$satnogs_key_path" 2> /dev/null

cat <<EOF | sudo tee "$satnogs_source_list_path"
deb [signed-by=${satnogs_key_path}] https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/librespace:/satnogs-unstable2/Debian_${VERSION_ID}/ /
EOF

log "Adding satnogs-client-rs repo"
#
# satnogs-client-rs repo
#
sudo wget https://satnogs.mhuebner.eu/debian/repository.asc -O "$satnogs_rs_key_path" 2> /dev/null

cat <<EOF | sudo tee "$satnogs_rs_source_list_path"
deb [signed-by=${satnogs_rs_key_path}] https://satnogs.mhuebner.eu/debian/ $VERSION_CODENAME main
EOF

log "Updating packages-sources."
sudo apt update --yes
log "done."

log "Installing Packages..."
sudo apt install --yes $packages
log "done."

log "Setting up rigctld..."
cat <<EOF | sudo tee "test.sh"
[Unit]
Description=Hamlib rigctld radio control daemon
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rigctld -r 127.0.0.1:4532
Restart=on-failure
User=root

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF
sudo systemctl enable rigctld
sudo systemctl start rigctld
log "done."