What are the advantages of building a ground station to be added to the network over a stand alone station
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I’ll present here what a Network station offers/means and you can find out if this is something useful or not from running a standalone station:
- By joining the Network and having an online station you are able to schedule observations to other stations of the Network, as other station owners can use your station’s free time to schedule observations.
- Similarly to a standalone station, you are still controlling your station 100%, when it will be online, which frequencies will receive, which jobs will run.
- In Network you can see by just visiting a page the next passes of the satellites in SatNOGS DB that can be tracked/received by your station and schedule them.
- You can auto-schedule observations, currently by using external auto-scheduler software (hopefully soon from inside the Network site) based on your priorities on satellites/transmissions.
- Network stores all the observations and their results online.
- By joining the Network you are able to be part of scheduled or urgent satellite operation tasks that are performed by the Network. For example tracking, reception and generation of orbital data for newly deployed satellites or satellites that are near re-entry, support of missions after requesting help from SatNOGS community, scheduled events like SSTV or ARISS contact transmissions etc.
These are some of the points that station owners in Network enjoy. However there are many contributors in SatNOGS project that run standalone stations and forward their received data in SatNOGS DB, through the SiDS protocol, or write about their observations here in the forum adding very useful information in our satellite hunting.
Whatever someone chooses, is more than welcome to be part of our community, learn and share knowledge with others!
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Awesome 
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