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Yes, there is a way. You can withdraw from the SatNOGS Project, or switch your station to testing mode if you do not want it to be included in automated scheduling.
Also, as an alternative option, you can also tell me what the issue. I’m open for the discussion.
Regards,
EU1AEM
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I’ve changed the topic to be more general for future reference.
The short answer is that you can not limit certain station owners from scheduling to your own stations.
For the long answer I’m going to describe the current status and some future features that eventually will come.
From the beginning of the SatNOGS Network the concept is to share a station with the rest of the community by contributing its free time aiming to track and receive satellites.
From the first stations/observations it became obvious that station owners have their own goals, needs and setups that may need different handling.
Thus we (dev team of SatNOGS Network) focused on delivering a platform that will respect the station owners and give them the full control of their stations in parallel with fair use from other station owners and the Network’s operators.
Currently the station owners can:
- Choose their hardware/software setup (as long as it returns certain artifacts (observation results) that Network requires)
- Set the frequency ranges that will be able to track with their stations
- Get station offline or put it in testing mode if needed to limit its use, for example during maintenance or used locally
- Schedule observations manually through the web interface or automatically through the API and use of external tools like auto-scheduler
- Delete scheduled observations when needed, for example pass of another satellite that station owner wants to prioritize/track
- Communicate through the various channels to coordinate with other station owners and Network operators. In case someone has difficulties, you can always contact me and I’ll do my best to solve any issue.
Of course the above don’t cover any case and may not the best way to perform some action, thus there are more upcoming changes that will give better control to stations owners. The most important of them:
- Separate the online/offline status from testing or not status, plus introduce unavailability option of a station. This is under testing for the next Network release and soon there will a detailed post about it
- Set unavailability periods (manually or automatically), that will allow station owners to set periods when the their station will not be available to use. This is still in planning and early development stage but fairly high in new features priorities
- Auto-scheduling inside Network, where station owner will define a station list of satellites that will get priority in automated scheduling. A generic Network list, defined by Network operators will use the free time of the stations for the Network’s needs after the station list is satisfied. There will be also a usage percentage option for defining how much a station will be utilized by the Network. This feature is also in planning stage and high in priorities.
Hopefully when the above will be completed, we will be able to cover the majority of station owners needs around scheduling and how they share their stations with the community.
If there are any other needs/cases that the above will not cover, feel free to open issues in the Network repository or a thread here to discuss them.
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Maybe it is not wise to ask, but what is it that disturbs you on that observations? As far as I can see, most of the observations do even succeed, even if they seem to be marked as bad.
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My antenna is quite a humble one, so when I first joined, it was like a popular diner—reservations were fully booked back-to-back! But lately? It has become a quiet, secluded mountain retreat with zero schedule.
It’s a bit lonely, to be honest. I’m almost tempted to put up a “Open for Business” sign or offer free coffee to the satellites!
All jokes aside, it’s interesting to see how scheduling ebbs and flows. Thanks to the dev team for keeping this great platform running! YUKIO
I’d like to apologize to @n5zkk for the rude words in my earlier reply. It wasn’t personal, just an emotional and unprofessional response. Sorry for that.
Regarding more flexible station availability and scheduling controls, I think they make sense. Traditionally, amateur radio has always been built around openness, sharing, and cooperation. However, a modern platform can provide additional controls and flexibility - not only general availability or utilization settings, but also exceptions where needed (time slots, specific users, satellites, etc.).
@n5zkk, I have excluded your 2416 N5ZKK-UHF-HELICAL station from my auto-scheduler. It will no longer receive observations from my scheduler.
EU1AEM
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We are passionate about the satellites, obviously, and have long-term commitments, so thank you Vitaly for the apology. That first message was a shock.
Thanks to SatNOGS, I can share my station, but there are often scheduling conflicts—for example, CUBEBEL-2 taking prime time slots. At first, I didn’t want to delete anything scheduled by others and made sure the UHF station was always available, but lately, I’ve had to delete conflicting passes. I even tried some python code and screen-scaping but nothing really helped.
My main interest is in weather, ham radio, and newly launched satellites. Like many, I use GetKissPlus to capture observations and upload decoded telemetry packets to SatNOGS, alongside SatDump for weather satellites. Because of this, I face frequent conflicts over the shared antenna array.
I don’t like missing someone’s scheduled SatNOGS observation because the antenna array was switched to a different SDR—leaving them wondering why the waterfall is clean and empty of signals. Having a native way in the network UI to show that a station is locally in use, or a feature to temporarily pause scheduling, would help immensely.
CubeBel-2 and many others remain on my favorites list of satellites and SatNOGs priorities list.
Best Regards,
John David Trolinger
N5ZKK EM00 Kerrville
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Please excuse me, I’m still a newcomer here and not entirely sure how everything works…
While looking at my station settings, I found this “Target Utilization” slider (as shown in the screenshot below).
Does lowering this percentage help limit or control how heavily the network schedules my station? Or is this related to what was discussed earlier about managing station workload?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Currently this is just an indicator and it isn’t used for limiting the workload. This value will be used when auto-scheduling is implemented.
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Mystery solved! So the “time machine” feature was already hiding in my settings panel waiting for the future. 
Thanks for the clarification, fredy! Looking forward to when that future arrives.
I came up with a solution to a somewhat similar problem on one of the stations I maintain:
- Every satellite-transmitter can be scheduled five times freely.
- after five times, my station will check the success rate for observations on itself.
- If the observation success is less than a certain threshold, those observations will be descheduled
I consider this a quite fair process: Everyone has a chance to use the station, but aggressive automatic scheduling without caring for the observation results will be disadvanteged. In result, people that actually have a good reason to observe specific satellites will also have more available observation time on that station.
I didn’t publish my code yet, as I wait for the way overdue release of the next version of satnogs-network.
I see that it is not a solution to @n5zkk specific problem, but feel that it fits here fine. For the other aspect with the slots: I usually schedule automatically myself a day in advance. But I do that on my personal stations only.
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@mhuebner I think this would be a great way of putting some fairness into the process. I have a certain observer who constantly schedules Frontiersat on my humble little station, with a zero percent success rate. It’s worth noting this particular fellow currently has over 1200 pending observations scheduled for Frontiersat. Fair? I’ll let others judge that, but as for managing slots on my station I would welcome your code.
One thought though, could observers game the system by automatically marking observations “Good”, thus artificially influencing how many slots they get? In any event, this sounds good to me.
KN6BKT