I’m a student from the Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain currently working on my bachelor’s thesis. I was introduced to SatNOGS via a professor of mine and decided to build a SatNOGS ground station here in Madrid as part of my Telecommunications Engineering bachelor’s thesis. Joining me is @astrojuanlu, who will be helping me throughout the process.
We were trying to decide how to make the project fit into what a bachelor’s thesis is supposed to be and we came up with the question: how could we give this a spin so that the thesis is not just reproducing the already defined steps and using the already developed software but has something innovative to add or some improvement to make?
Can you think of any way that we could contribute to the project by either exploring new alternatives or further developing in any specific direction?
I think the thesis could focus on operational aspects that improve what Satnogs is currently doing. One improvement is about providing ranging of satellites, that is, Space Situational Awareness (SSA). That is, if you setup the satnogs station, the station gets satellite data. The processing done in Satnogs is evolving to save some observation data to perform satellite ranging. I think it would be great to provide measurements and analysis on the performance achieved with such data. Have a look at the threads Open Data for Space Situational Awareness - A way forward and SatNOGS and orbit determination - Collaboration with Celestrak.
@raquelch
Do you look for something closer to telecommunications hardware, like electronics (filter/lna) or mechanical (antennas etc), or closer to software, like GNU Radio stuff etc?