Fairly frequently, I receive signals on a pass that are very clearly from the satellite (signal in middle of waterfall, start and end of acquisition as expected) but the modulation is different than predicted. For instance, this pass of Kashiwa: SatNOGS Network - Observation 9901004
It appears that this is indeed Kashiwa, but instead of seeing GMSK4k8 (predicted) there is a CW signal right on the center of the waterfall. The CW is a bit hard to copy because the receiver was set up for FM, so there is no BFO, but it appears to be a string of telemetry data. I suspect this is Kashiwa.
How should I categorize this observation? To me, it is successful because the satellite signal was in fact heard, but I don’t want to poison the database with observations that are CW instead of GMSK, for instance.
It captures a signal from the intended satellite; with signal.
We cannot keep on differentiating baudrates and such while viewing the waterfall, this should be in the demodulated frames, but is not.
The format of the uploads is json and while it supports fields for a lot more info, it is not used at the moment. I asked this question years ago when I wrote the converter for gr-satellites integration.
Usually, as @SA2KNG noted, in these cases we rate the waterfall as “with signal” given that the signal comes from the satellite.
Then if this is the only transmission you get from the satellite I suggest you update the entries in SatNOGS DB by setting the transmitter with the not heard modulation as inactive.
This change will change the default selected transmitter in Network scheduling to one of the active transmitters while will allow you to select if you want the inactive one.