gr-satellites gives a large number of tools that can be reused when developing a groundstation solution for a small satellite mission, and it is designed with that goal in mind.
If you are working on a satellite mission (especially if it uses Amateur radio spectrum) and you are thinking about using some parts of gr-satellites to build your groundstation, rather than forking off a decoder that only works for your own satellite, please give some thought to the idea of contributing back to upstream the changes needed to incorporate support for your satellite in the upstream gr-satellites version.
In this way, you get for free some advantages, such as a large user base of Amateur satellite observers and Amateur radio operators already familiar with the installation and operation of the software, maintainance to keep your software working with new versions of GNU Radio or future improvements of gr-satellites (this is especially important if you plan on a short main mission of a few months but your satellite will continue transmitting afterwards, perhaps for several years), and other advantages related to forming part of a large worldwide community.
Additionally, if your satellite uses Amateur radio spectrum, it will eventually be supported in gr-satellites anyway, since gr-satellites strives to support all Amateur satellites. Therefore, by collaborating and incorporating your changes back to upstream, you save me work in adding to gr-satellites support for your satellite.
Even if you are thinking about using an external tool to process your telemetry, such as a GUI tool to classify, show and store telemetry values, the gr_satellites command line tool can easily be connected to such a tool by using appropriate data sinks with TCP sockets, ZeroMQ or other IPC methods. By using the upstream gr_satellites command line tool as your decoding backend, you gain all the support from the community.
So if you are planning to use gr-satellites for something as important as your next satellite mission, we are glad to have you on-board. You are more than welcome to write in the Github discussions a heads-up message, such as a statement of interest or presentation letter (you can make it look the way you like) so that we are aware of your work and can start coordinating efforts with you.
With gr-satellites, I have been supporting dozens of satellite missions over more than four years, so I have good experience about which communication technologies work best, and which work worse. Thus, I am also happy to give advice if you are in the early planning stages of your mission.
Daniel Estévez, gr-satellites lead developer