Turn a Raspberry Pi and a motorized dish into a fully automated satellite ground station.
Parkes ties together rotator control, orbital tracking, SDR management, and satellite pass decoding into a single web dashboard — no soldering required. It uses existing open source tools (Hamlib, skyfield, satdump, SoapySDR) so you don't have to reimplement any of them.
- Point your dish anywhere. Parkes drives any
rotctldcompatible rotator, with automatic crash-restart and live reconfiguration — no restart needed. - Track anything in the sky. Computes az/el for satellites (from TLEs) and fixed sources (Sun, Moon, Cas A) using skyfield. Follows passes in real time.
- Decode satellite passes automatically. Launches satdump (or any other command) as an orchestrated app for the duration of a pass, with pass prediction and scheduling built in.
- Use whatever SDR you have. Exposes SoapySDR devices to satdump, or shares them over SoapyRemote to a remote laptop running gpredict/gqrx.
- Live GPS location. Feeds gpsd for real-time lat/lon/elevation, or use fixed coordinates.
Any computer or Raspberry Pi + any rotctld compatible rotator controller + an SDR dongle (RTL-SDR, HackRF, etc.) + a motorized dish mount. Optional: USB GPS dongle.
See docs/deploy.md.
docker compose up --build
