Ground station not turning in right direction

[Joe_CWU]

Hello! We have been doing some testing with our ground station over the past few days and keep running into the same problem.

After going through the calibration process for the IMU, we are hitting "launch tracker" and the ground station is turning from its center position to a new position (this has been a new position every day we have done it). We are receiving GPS data from the iridium payload. We have our iridium payload on the roof of our building if that makes a difference. Hitting "recenter" turns the ground station back to its zero position momentarily, then it turns back to where it was. Pressing "move to last known location" does nothing. Are we missing something obvious?

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.
-Joe

[Austin MnSGC]

It sounds like everything is working as it should. When you launch the tracker, every time a new point is received (you can see these in the upper left), the tracker points to it. When you move the antenna to the center position, it only stays there until the next new position is received. If the tracker is already facing the direction of its most recent update, the move to last known location button won't do anything because it's already facing that way.

What you need to do is make sure that your information is accurate. Make sure that the ground station location and center bearing are correct (in the bottom left table). Then make sure that when the tracker moves to aim itself at a location, that the bearing and elevation angle it thinks the payload is at (top left table) is the same as the bearing and elevation angle that it is facing (bottom left table). If the bearing and elevation angles match, then everything is fine.

If you find that your tracker isn't facing the payload when all of this is correct, it's because the information is not accurate. The aiming is based on GPS coordinates, namely the coordinates for the ground station, and the coordinates of the payload. Make sure that your payload is a good distance away from the tracker to eliminate the issue of GPS inaccuracy, and then make sure that the GPS location of your tracker is correct.