About Satellite and Transmitter Suggestions

SatNOGS
1

Looking at all the suggestions not yet checked, my motivation to add more is dropping rapidly.

For satellites there are 395 and for transmitters 306 suggestions both reaching back until 2021.

It appears to me that the bottleneck issue, which has been evident at suggestions for almost 5 years and also exists in other areas (e. g. decoders), is not being taken seriously enough.
And on a side note, the ask for approvals leaves a bad taste, as someones contributions might not sit well with upper management.

On a larger scale: The problem runs deeper within the system.
And it isn’t getting help, it’s accepting it gracefully.

Transporter-17 Rideshare: VSFB SLC-4E : 2026-07-07 07:10 UTC
2

I didn’t realize there were so many suggestions that weren’t moderated, so I understand the comment made by @dl7ndr.

The lack of a decoder is also something that has puzzled me for some time. At the moment, the gr-satellites integration offers me the opportunity to work around this. It would be good if this could also be done with the standard satnogs flowgraphs, but in my opinion that is not the case.

I do think “approval” is something we need to keep, maybe rename it to moderation also to keep the information off good quality.

Jan | PE0SAT

3

I’ve moved the posts to a separate thread to discuss it in more detail.

For satellites suggestions the problem right now that limit us is a technical one, leaving review free to anyone it may causes disruption to both DB and Network. This is why currently making me the bottleneck. There is a plan to solve this and allow more people reviewing the satellite suggestions but other dev tasks have more priority.

For transmitter suggestions there are more people able to review them, however there isn’t a clear guide, so they may not feel confident to do so. This is something I’m also planning to mitigate by writing documentation for reviewers.

Why reviewing every suggestion. From the first days of the project, we realized that there is a lot of mis-information out there, so we had two options:

  1. To leave everything free to edit, like wikipedia, and don’t take any responsibility for the reliability of the data
  2. To have a review and citation system that will ensure that the information are trustworthy, in this way there will be less issues but it will take more time to maintain the data

There was a small period that we tried the first solution, this created a lot of issues, like satellites with wrong NORAD IDs, transmitters with wrong frequencies, data from unreliable sources and some frustration in operations.

So, under my decision mostly, we moved to the second solution. There are still problems and some time wrong data, but the vast majority of them they are resolved before reaching the users of DB.

At this point let me make clear that the DB is not only source of data for SatNOGS Network but for other software/apps too, which is kind of a result of the openness and the reliability of the data. This is a relation which needs to be maintained, in my opinion, by making sure that the DB data can be trusted.

With the current resources we have we do the best we can, but unfortunately even the reviewing of the suggestions needs to be prioritized, thus I knowingly prioritize which ones are more important, timely or per significance, and reviewing them. Of course sometimes I lose the overview, thus I have many time said that if there is any suggestion (especially a satellite one) that needs immediate attention, ping me in posts/threads , with pm, email, in the chatrooms whatever and I’ll do my best. For example I prefer to spend my time to get a satellite that will be deployed in the next launch than checking a suggestion for adding the launch date of an old/re-entered satellite.

Saying all the above here are some stats for the suggestions for 2026:

Satellites Suggestions:
Total 1026 (60 of them created automatically through SiDS for a non-existed NORAD ID in DB) (153 the last month)
Reviewed 880 (85,77%)
Non-reviewed 146 (14.23%, 45 of them are the automatically created)

Transmitter Suggestions:
Total 915 (194 the last month)
Reviewed 767 (83,83%)
Non-reviewed 148 (16.17%)

That’s all I can offer as a comment about the current status of Satellite and Transmitter suggestions, the processes we follow, the decisions that have been made and the data that have been contributed in SatNOGS DB.

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Thank you for your detailed post, fredy.

And what was the problem during the last 5 years?

This is the problem of the system.
Everyone can upload senseless (telemetry) data, no one wants to review it.
But when it comes to points like satellites and transmitter database entries, the system says: “You are not trustworthy.”.

Without a guide or documentation (not even for reviewers) option 1 was bound to fail.
I’m pretty sure we can move back to this solution with a good documentation.

If we want SatNOGS to thrive, it must have trust in all its contributors.

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