-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 4
Main Application
After starting the program you are greeted with the main application window in the schedule tab. Here a list of all groundstations and satellites are displayed to calculate a schedule with. The contacts tab that can be selected at the top will display the scheduled contacts to each satellite. The Stations and Satellite tabs will show basic information about the satellite and station.
To calculate a schedule select the groundstations and satellites that are to be included and select the time frame for the schedule. The time frame is variable from hours up to days even weeks and longer. However the longer the duration the more time the computations will require. Currently there are four schedulers to choose from and four different scenarios. There are different scheduling objectives pre defined that can be selected. However not every scheduler will support them. Currently the EFT-Greedy scheduler will always schedule by Earliest-Finish-Time and Priority.
If everything is set the schedule can be calculated and the results will be displayed and a result file will be saved at the location defined in the settings.
Calculated schedules can be saved and previously saved ones can be loaded into the program. This allows schedules to be reevaluated without the need to recalculate the contact windows again. The schedules are saved in the XML-file format each file. Depending on the size of the problem to solve these can be quite large and can exceed the 1GB file size.
To add a satellite select add satellite on the left of the main window or in the menu at the top. Satellites can be added into the database by different ways.
The fastes and easiest way is to provide a txt-file containing the TLE information (Two-Line Element) of each satellite. An example can be seen below.
TLE-Example
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
1 NNNNNU NNNNNAAA NNNNN.NNNNNNNN +.NNNNNNNN +NNNNN-N +NNNNN-N N NNNNN
2 NNNNN NNN.NNNN NNN.NNNN NNNNNNN NNN.NNNN NNN.NNNN NN.NNNNNNNNNNNNNN
One can also import the information manually by entering the TLE-information by hand.
TLE information can be imported online if the NORAD ID of each satellite is known. Multiple Id's can be entered separated by a comma. This requires a SpaceTrack.org account since the access to the API is only possible with username and password. With such an account it is also possible to update the TLE data at regular intervals. This can selected in the Settings.
Ground Stations can be added in a similar fashion as the satellites. Either by manual input of each station or providing a txt-file with multiple ground stations. StationName Latitude Longitude Height (in meters above see Level)
Example of Stations txt-file:
Station1 50.4886846 15.56843 1523