Status

The status page of the user interface.

The status page of the user interface. Up to three sensors can be connected to a ground station and displayed on the dashboard.

The status information for each sensor is shown in a separate box. At the top of each box are three LED-type indicators:

• Sensor Alive: indicates that the control unit of a sensor is connected to the ground station.

• GPS Fix: turns green when the GPS module has acquired a position fix.

• Good Data: indicates that a strong enough signal is received in the HH and VV spectra and that the GPS is seeing at least five satellites. Data are only stored when the indicator is on; "bad" data is not stored.

The four bar graphs show the following information:

• RFI Level: this is a rough estimate of the level of RFI across the spectrum.

• Ch1 and Ch2 Level: show the total signal level in each polarization, which, ideally, should be around 20 to 40 percent.

• Backlog: shows the amount of ring memory used on the control unit, which is data that still needs to be transferred to the ground station.

The next four fields are self-explanatory. Of the four temperatures shown in the next field, the first temperature (LNA) is the temperature measured close to the calibration load on the amplifier PCB. The next three temperatures are the chip temperatures of the FPGA and the two A/D converters.

WiFi RSSI is the signal strength of the ground station access point as detected by the control unit.

The four values shown under Thresholds have the following meaning. The first two values are usually higher than the next two values. The values represent the thresholds used in the sample-based (time-domain) interference filter. The thresholds start at a value of 2048 and auto-adjust to reasonable values within 1-2 minutes.

The Controller Firmware field shows the versions of firmware running on the STM32 and ESP8266 chips on the control unit.

Whenever at least one of the sensors in the dashboard does not, for whatever reason, generate good data, the background colour of the user interface changes to orange, as shown below. This is to alert the user of a possible problem.

The status display with an orange background indicates that one or more of the recognized sensors do not provide good data.

It is common for the dashboard to turn orange while in flight when the radiometer controller loses its connection to the telemetry's WiFi network. Whenever the drone is stationary and Motion-Detect is activated, the dashboard will also remain orange.