Bulk access to Network observation history, for station-health research?

Hi — following on from the DB rate thread.

I’m building something that tells a station operator whether a silent antenna is theirs or just a quiet sky: compare a station’s recent reception against its own history, and against what every other station managed the same day. @bali put his finger on the gap — our view is satellite-centric, so a station that re-points looks identical to one that died.

The orbital geometry I can compute myself. What I can’t derive is per-station observation history: which passes a station attempted, and whether they were vetted good. That lives in Network.

Two questions:

  1. Is there a dump or export of Network observations, or is the API the only route?

  2. If it’s the API — what volume and rate would be acceptable to pull a few months of history, once? I’d rather size to your answer than guess. Last time I guessed, I got our IP blocked.

Overwatch is open source and the station view would be open data. Happy to publish results back to the community, and to anonymise stations in anything public.

2 Likes

@fredy — tagging you since you answered the DB-side rate question last week; this is the Network equivalent, and I’d rather ask than guess again.

Hey, I’m currently a little busy with the tomorrow’s DB and Network releases, I’ll try to answer in detail until the weekend.

1 Like

I was saying it in the Matrix chat, but I’ll suggest it again here - there needs to be some sort of cached, partitioned-by-day endpoint for fetching these massive amounts of data.

There is no alternative currently - the paginated API is the only way currently.