Hi,
Does anyone know if I can schedule observations on SATNOGS if I don’t register a ground station?
Hi @masonmcc and welcome in the community!
Unfortunately for scheduling to SatNOGS Network you need to have an online station.
You can check the permissions matrix here.
The concept is that you offer a station to the Network that others can use, in order to be able to use other people’s stations.
Are you interesting observing a specific satellite or in general?
Hi @fredy!
That is unfortunate. I am hoping to use SATNOGS to observe a CubeSat that my group is launching in 2026. Is the best method to build my own small ground station so that I can observe?
How easy is it to get observations once you are on the network?
@fredy Do you also happen to know if I can contact my satellite if I am on a very specific frequency and other ground stations are slightly off of that frequency?
Separately, can SATNOGS uplink and downlink?
Either you can build your own personal ground station or you can build something as cubesat group. It doesn’t need to be something complicated at start. For more information you can check the wiki.satnogs.org.
For the Cubesat launch, if we know the details of the transmissions of the satellite, we are going to track it as we do with many missions, especially for SSA purposes (space situational awareness). Other than that we support radio amateur missions (that are IARU coordinated) as many of the stations are radio amateurs.
If you want SatNOGS Network to support your cubesat what we suggest is integration with the Network as early as possible. I can give you more details on that if you want.
Stations support ranges of frequencies, it is easy to search which station support a specific frequency by filtering this search. If by slightly off you mean the doppler effect then the station can handle this.
About uplink/downlink, the current status is that we support only downlink (space to earth), however for LSF projects but independently too, we plan to support uplink by having station to support it. Unfortunately there isn’t a clear roadmap for this and there are several other priorities to be implemented first.
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Thanks for the reply. If I build my own ground station and want to register it with SATNOGS can I choose windows of time where I can use it directly for my own satellite and not be available for SATNOGS?
I would love some more details on integration.
@masonmcc oops I missed your last reply 
Unfortunately currently there isn’t a way to schedule downtime for your station, so if the station is in online status can be used by the Network. This is something we plan to implement in the future.
However what you can do is to stop the client software running when you need to use your station and then bring it back when you finish. This will have as a result if there are any scheduled observations, and you haven’t removed them (station owner has this access for owned stations), to fail but it should be ok as a temporary solution.
About the integration details I’ll send you in the next couple of days a pm here in the forum.