During our quest for reliable Satellite transponder data we came into a sad realization. There is nowhere out there such a thing as a complete transponder database for operational satellites.
Having this information is crucial for SatNOGS operations on multiple levels. Observation scheduling, observation job details and mainly ground station operations.
It was obvious that we needed to build a DB of all transponders of operational satellites, and in a true community and open data fashion it needed to be open, crowd-sourced and not necessarily SatNOGS specific
What we ended up with as a solution is SatNOGS DB . A separate crowd-sourced suggestions app build around transponder data for satellites. The source of truth about transponder data still lives under SatNOGS network (our main observation and scheduling website)(see previous posts) and SatNOGS DB would expose all these data and enable users around the world to provide suggestions about transponders for satellites.
Technically, the stack we are using is really interesting, thanks to our hipster-friendly software expert Nemo. In an effort to make this app as abstract, white-labeled and not SatNOGS specific as possible, no relational specific-schema database is used on the backend. We are using CouchDB [1] as our backend (with the appropriate hooks to SatNOGS Network) and a combination of PouchDB [2] and AngularJS [3] as our client-side front-end. This provides the ultimate flexible and responsive platform for best UX and re-usability. All suggestions are stored in blobs and once they land (moderated and approved) back to SatNOGS Network they become part of our SatNOGS Network database.
We will be pushing the site live this week (after re-factoring the code) and kickstarting the data with sources we could find around the net. (A post will follow)
Furthermore, by solving our data issue, we are providing the world (and especially ham and amateur satellite communities) with an open, accessible, crowd-sourced database for Satellite Transponder data. (yeah open data!)
