I have been working on making a simple python program to visualize the antenna patterns of Stations on the network using existing satellites. This would help plot out the nulls in antenna system along with obstructions. (They unfortunately appear the same the way I am working on.)
The basics of this work started as a little personal project to map out the nulls in my vertical antenna using the NOAA sats. I decided that if I pull data from the network for my station I could easily make this work on other stations.
The basic way it works is taking a polar plot and plotting the color as the intensity of the signal received. (In this case the NOAA APT signal) By stepping thru the pass and using FFT to find the signal in the audio points can be drawn on the plot in the correct location and also with a color representing the intensity. Doing this over many observations allow for building up a plot of the full sky.
You’d need to get the TLE that went with the observation to get the az/el at the timestamps from the ogg file. I’m not sure there’s an API point to get the TLEs though…
I believe the TLE at the bottom of an observation page is the one used for it. I could also start from this point on. Logging the TLE sent with the jobs.
Actually, you can off course get the TLEs from space-track.org and find the one closest to the observation time. That should be good enough to get az/el, as the orbits are pretty stable.
As a check for dropped frames you might want to compare the length of the recording with the pass duration. I’ve had observations where the recording was shorter than the scheduled pass because something caused some dropped frames.
It will be like the plots Fredy made but it will focus on the signal instead of the amount of data extracted from signal.
This is why I plan on using NOAA Sats as the satellite used. Because its downlink is pretty constant and also has a simple signal to extract information about the signal strength.
That’s why each plot would only be relevant to each station but not between stations.
This isn’t to compare how good stations are but to explore the antenna’s on the station and the environment around them just from observations. And also mostly for fun.