Six weeks ago, CelesTrak and SatNOGS both blocked my server’s IP — on the same afternoon. They were right to. My ingest was polling a per-object endpoint every 120 seconds for objects it would never find: ~3,600 requests a day against an endpoint its maintainer asks people not to poll.
Four days without telemetry made me actually read what I was building on: orbital elements maintained by one person for thirty years, a database run by a small foundation on donated time, antennas on volunteers’ roofs. Not an API — a commons.
What changed on my side: one bulk request per hour instead of ~700 per-object calls a day, backoff persisted across restarts, a refusal treated as an answer, every SatNOGS call paced under 6/min. Then I wrote to both maintainers describing exactly what my server had been doing to theirs. Both unblocked me within days. Same 23 satellites, fresher than before.
If you build on this data: measure what you send upstream, and assume a person reads the logs on the other side.
The station app from my earlier thread came out of the same weeks. To try it: open Overwatch-dev on your phone, type your station’s name or a satellite (e.g. your callsign), and you get your reception against your own baseline, pass by pass, down to the decoded frames. Nothing to sign up for; your browser’s “Install app” menu entry puts it on your home screen.
Native apps for iPhone and Android are in progress — submitted and in store review now. I’ll follow up here the day they’re available.
Feedback very welcome, here or on the app thread.
