`orbitforge stations list`

Synopsis


orbitforge stations list

Description

Prints the built-in ground-station catalog. These are real stations with published locations, provided so that access and link analyses can be run against a realistic ground segment without hand-entering coordinates.

Worked example


orbitforge stations list


14 catalog stations:
  dsn:goldstone      NASA DSN Goldstone (Mojave, USA)             lat  35.4267 lon -116.8900 alt  1.00 km, mask 6 deg
  dsn:madrid         NASA DSN Madrid (Robledo, Spain)             lat  40.4314 lon   -4.2481 alt  0.83 km, mask 6 deg
  dsn:canberra       NASA DSN Canberra (Tidbinbilla, Australia)   lat -35.4014 lon  148.9819 alt  0.69 km, mask 6 deg
  nen:wallops        NASA NEN Wallops Flight Facility (USA)       lat  37.9402 lon  -75.4664 alt  0.01 km, mask 5 deg
  nen:fairbanks      Alaska Satellite Facility, Fairbanks (USA)   lat  64.8595 lon -147.8489 alt  0.20 km, mask 5 deg
  ksat:svalbard      KSAT Svalbard SvalSat (Norway)               lat  78.2297 lon   15.3975 alt  0.45 km, mask 5 deg
  ksat:troll         KSAT TrollSat (Antarctica)                   lat -72.0117 lon    2.5350 alt  1.27 km, mask 5 deg
  ksat:punta-arenas  KSAT Punta Arenas (Chile)                    lat -52.9400 lon  -70.8500 alt  0.03 km, mask 5 deg
  ssc:esrange        SSC Esrange (Kiruna, Sweden)                 lat  67.8840 lon   21.0380 alt  0.34 km, mask 5 deg
  ssc:inuvik         SSC Inuvik (Canada)                          lat  68.3190 lon -133.5490 alt  0.05 km, mask 5 deg
  ssc:santiago       SSC Santiago (Chile)                         lat -33.1300 lon  -70.6670 alt  0.73 km, mask 5 deg

Output elided; the catalog contains 14 stations.

Reading an entry

Field	Example	Meaning
Identifier	`dsn:madrid`	Namespaced as `network:site`
Description	NASA DSN Madrid (Robledo, Spain)	Operator and location
lat	40.4314	Degrees north, negative for south
lon	-4.2481	Degrees east, negative for west
alt	0.83 km	Height above the reference ellipsoid
mask	6 deg	Minimum elevation the site will work

Longitude is positive east. Madrid is at -4.2481, which is 4.2 degrees west. Entering it as positive places the station in Turkey, and nothing downstream will look obviously wrong. See units and conventions.

Why the elevation mask matters

Every catalog entry carries a mask, typically 5 or 6 degrees, because real stations do not work satellites at the horizon. Terrain, buildings, and atmospheric attenuation make the last few degrees useless.

The mask is part of the site definition, not a preference. Running an access analysis at a zero-degree mask produces contact counts that no real station achieves, and link budgets evaluated at those geometries are optimistic by several decibels.

The catalog is geographically deliberate

Three groupings are worth noticing, because they explain what these sites are for:

Grouping	Sites	Purpose
Roughly 120 degrees apart in longitude	Goldstone, Madrid, Canberra	The Deep Space Network arrangement, giving continuous coverage of a deep-space target as the Earth rotates
High latitude	Svalbard 78 N, Troll 72 S, Inuvik 68 N, Esrange 68 N	Polar and sun-synchronous satellites pass over the poles every orbit, so a high-latitude station sees nearly every pass
Southern high latitude	Troll, Punta Arenas, Santiago	Southern-hemisphere coverage, which is otherwise sparse

Svalbard at 78 degrees north can see almost every orbit of a polar satellite, which is why it is the standard choice for sun-synchronous Earth-observation downlink.

Using a station in an analysis

Analysis commands take stations as an inline specification rather than by catalog identifier:


orbitforge link \
  --constellation demo.json \
  --station "Madrid,40.43,-3.7,0.6" \
  --frequency-ghz 20 --availability 99.9 --climate-zone K

The format is Name,latitude_deg,longitude_deg,altitude_km. Use stations list to look up coordinates, then supply them in that form.

orbitforge stations list