Hello everyone,
As you all are aware, as of August 17, the National Weather Service began
broadcasting their new NOAAport feed with 60+ Mbps of goodness.
I had to switch over a dish over the weekend and today, and
I ran into a few pitfalls which you should be aware of, and hopefully this
will make your transition go as smoothly as possible.
First, if you are using a Novra S300/S300N, be advised that the latest
firmwware update is Version 2, Revision 11 (V2R11). I bet many of you are
only running V2R7. So guess what? You get to do a firmware upgrade. The
latest one supports APSK, while R7 only supports PSK. While it does seem
to work with R7, there might be issues I don't want to deal with since it
doesn't support APSK. So, what I would do is upgrade it to firmware
version 11. This is best done physically at the device itself using the
Novra-supplied GUI, available on their support website; it's a lot
easier than using cmcs. If you use cmcs to do it, it will work...but the
Novra will reset it's IP address to 192.168.0.1. Yep, that causes a
conflict on just about everyone's system, and that's a pain to work
around. If you must use CMCS as we did, be advised, and change your
server to not use 192.168.0.1 as a gateway for a while until you can
change the Novra back to the original IP address you had it set at.
So, before you do that firmware upgrade...
See that save command on the Novra CMCS, or on the GUI? Save the
Novra configuration to the disk. It will make it somewhat easier, and then
you can reload it after the firmware upgrade is complete. That upgrade
wipes out your settings, and since it's been several years since you
probably have messed with it, saving at least a few settings might be
helpful to you.
Once you have all of that done, now you can change the receiver
settings to receive the new NOAAport broadcast.
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/noaaport/document/AWIPS%20Program%20Receiver%20Configuration%20v1.1.pdf
Use the TOP half of the page; ignore the bottom half unless you want to
configure a second receiver to get the NOAA Weather Wire Service (NWWS).
Yep, that's being sent across as well, but on a different frequency.
Oh, see the part where it says "polarity: Horizontal/Right?" It should be
Horizontal/Left. I need to tell them that needs to be fixed.
Now, go into your ldmd.conf, and make sure you have all of these:
# Entries needed to read and process the DVB-S/DVB-S2 streams.
# dvbs shared memory ingest processes
exec "dvbs_multicast -n -m 224.0.1.1"
exec "dvbs_multicast -n -m 224.0.1.2"
exec "dvbs_multicast -n -m 224.0.1.3"
exec "dvbs_multicast -n -m 224.0.1.4"
exec "dvbs_multicast -n -m 224.0.1.5"
exec "dvbs_multicast -n -m 224.0.1.6"
exec "dvbs_multicast -n -m 224.0.1.7"
exec "dvbs_multicast -n -m 224.0.1.8"
# readnoaaport shared memory readers
exec "readnoaaport -m 224.0.1.1"
exec "readnoaaport -m 224.0.1.2"
exec "readnoaaport -m 224.0.1.3"
exec "readnoaaport -m 224.0.1.4"
exec "readnoaaport -m 224.0.1.5"
exec "readnoaaport -m 224.0.1.6"
exec "readnoaaport -m 224.0.1.7"
exec "readnoaaport -m 224.0.1.8"
Yep, one for each pid. Now, you're ready to roll! Enjoy the new feed.
Thanks to Ryan Hickman at AllisonHouse for helping me through this!
And I hope this helps you, because if you have a NOAAport earth
station with a Novra receiver and don't do this in the next 43
days, it will not be fun to be you.
Thoughts/concerns/comments/typical panic and chaos welcome.
Gilbert
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Gilbert Sebenste ********
(My opinions only!) ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University ****
E-mail: sebenste@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu **
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/NIU_Weather **
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/niu.weather *
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