Rotator Controller

gpredict is able to signal a rotator controller over TCP. This is awesome, I want to track satellites and I am not going to pay for a rotator controller. I am going to build something to get my antenna pointed, using servos and a wifi microcontroller board.

I have tried searching a few times, but like everything amateur radio hard facts are hard to come by, the scam artists and windows developers protecting their sacred lore abound. I was at a bit of loss until I thought to try seeing what gpredict spits out over the network.

First I created a test rotator in the gpredict settings:

Then I dug around until I could find the rotator control panel, named antenna control. In this panel there is a 'track' button and an 'engage' button, figuring engage was the test option to manually set the rotator I hit that.

After a short pause a helpful 'ERROR' pops up under the Az/El settings, Good progress. Next I started up nc pretending to be a listening rotator controller so I could see what gpredict was sending.

$ nc -l 0.0.0.0 4533  
p

P  180.00   45.00

p

P  180.00   45.00

p

P  180.00   45.00

p

P  180.00   45.00



p

P  180.00   45.00

This output is great, nc is just outputting the bytes sent down the tcp connection. It seems that gpredict sends a letter 'p', I replied with a blank line by hitting enter, this resulted in a capital 'P' and a Az and El. Some guess work interpretation suggests gpredict is asking for our position with 'p', then giving us a position to move to with 'P'.

This is a great start, next I will have a look through the gpredict source to see what it is doing. I will start with the 'engage' button from gtk-rot-ctrl.c .

Reading: Abaddon's Gate