out of couriosity I have built a ground station, built an antenna, made tests and finally opened my station to the public - as many of us did.
How station owners can really benefit from observations being carried out via their setup?
Is there an module that allow deeper analysis of what was happening?
I am inteested in some statistics saying for example how my antenna behave to analyze for example its pattern - if possible. Maybe some map of the satellite pass with marked stations receiving its signal with basic informations like signal strength or reception status?
Maybe it is something yet to create - and that is fine - but I wanted to ask open question just to get a feedback on a returned value to the station owner in terms of knowledge/skills he/she is about to gain beside what is to be learned by playing around with observatins scheduling and artifacts analysis?
Let’s discuss here briefly what we’d like to invent in order to have SatNOGS be even more attractive to setup more ground stations.
From my own experience I’d like to see on a satellite view an icon if any of mine stations took already a part in its obserwations and to be able to schedule an obserwation directly from the satellite page.
On the TinyGS.com system, simultaneous observations are grouped together and a map is displayed showing all the stations that received that observation. Example can be found at:
Thanks for opening this thread, it is really useful to know how the experience of a station owner can be improved.
Part of what you suggest has been presented in the past by using external tools, like these polar plots or maps for specific events like this one, however it would be nice to have them inside the network and be generated dynamically.
There are some issues currently in the Network’s repository for adding stats and other info for the stations but due to limited developer resources other issues are/were prioritized. So, I can not promise when they will be implemented, but implementing them remain high in the agenda.
Some other features that are ongoing and that will help for having more details for stations and the network in general are the changes in the vetting and the implementation of the waterfall data artifact.
A quick overview for these changes:
Improved vetting process, multiple vetting and opening vetting to more people (and not only to the station owners) will help to gather better stats for the satellites and for stations too.
Waterfall data artifact will allow us to perform a better analysis on the data of the waterfall that we get from the stations, including power of signal and noise, snr etc, which will help us to also analyze the behavior of the satellites and the stations.
We can discuss more the above and I would be happy to hear more ideas how Network can be improved in the future for station owners.
I could drop some ideas on how to make a contribution to satnogs more engaging:
One should be able to read on wiki or be re-directed to good sources of knowledge related to satellites, their operation, modes of transmissions etc.
There should be a more advanced way of searching and scheduling of the future observations which should allow for bulk scheduling. For example all sats with lora and cw transmitter for the next 5 days or so. If single sat would have them both then probably something should be taken with higher prio - don’t know yet how to solve that.
There should be possible to analyze antenna performance and its pattern and compare with another one one owns.
Satota - satellites on the air, or any other contest-like programme should be run in order to make operators wanting to hunt for the satellites. Maybe 50 different sats contest, Maybe freshly launched ones contest, Maybe as many observations as possible from the location - it doesn’t matter as long as there is a fun and something meaningful to do. Scheduling randomly selected observations is boring after 2 days.
To sum-up: if there is a motivation behind some contest-like activity operators would upgrade their station, they will learn and share their knowledge (that also could be the activity to gain some badge in return) and for sure they will invent due to the nature of people. If the only thing people will get in return for their investments (time, hardware) are artifacts from RAW signal which are most of the time useless for anybody but satellite owner after some hours of amazement there will be a question “so now what” and setup probably will go down.
I may be wrong in 100% but in my humble opinion step by step satnogs may become a great platform to learn and to contribute.
Just like any other radio-like activity which creates a desire to do things that develop skills and build the knowledge.