What

The Nurds Remote Antenna Site, or NRAS for short is a location where we as space can place a couple of our own antennas. Located at the highest, or close to highest point of Wageningen.

The goal is to expand our Meshtastic network, expand our NURDS powered ads-b tracking, as well as have other services such as AIS tracking, P2000, general SDR listing, Lora satellite tracking, weather satellite tracking.

In combination with the antennas at the space, it opens up for more fun to be had with radiowaves as well as provide a great learning opportunity for members!

Currently this project is still in the stage of starting up.

(pre) Deployment

Location

Friday 22 March we will be able to conduct a site survey. There are two possible locations:

- De watertoren

- De Belmonte flat

Location Needs

The location by all means needs to have internet access and power available. If needed, we can run a USB fiber extensions from the antennas over to a location where the host system is.

Parts already available

Raspberry PI 4 8GB
30-1300Mhz discone antenna (Not sure if we will use this, might be fine at the space)
1090Mhz ADSB antenna
866Mhz Lora antenna (idea is to use the one currently used at the space and replace the one at the space with a slightly worse one donated by Folkert)

Parts needed

SDR for ADSB (available/could be bought)

https://www.sossolutions.nl/flightaware-pro-stick-plus-usb-sdr-ads-b-receiver or https://www.sossolutions.nl/flightaware-pro-stick-usb-sdr-ads-b-receiver

Both of these are great sticks. The first one has a 1090 Mhz bandpass filter. Filtering is something we likely want to do as there are other antennas around transmitting and the SDRs are quite sensitive to this.

Another solution would be to try to see if we can get a cheaper SDR, for example a RTL-SDR V3 or a NOOLEC and buy something like https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005004987445918.html

The question is, how well will this work?

However, since the space does have the pro stick, we could move that to the new site and experiment at the space with a slightly different setup.

Cables, connectors

We gonna need to figure out what cabling we need and how long, and the connectors. This also depends on the remote site location.