DeepEarthScience

The new lecture year is coming and the satellite communications and tracking practicum is about to start. In this lecture, students have to plan a satellite pass, record the downlink signal, and post-process this data, such that they can recover some parameters like: Time of Closest Approach (TCA), carrier frequency of the satellite, and error estimates compared to TLE (see previous blog posts: here , here , and here ). For the first part, the students need to compute when the satellite is flying overhead. There are many websites and apps that are able to give you 5 day predictions, but I wanted to see if I could do this myself. As a little boy I always had the tendency to say: 'I can do that too!'. Up until the time my father said: 'Son, you can only say "I can do that too", when you at least have done it ones.' So, living by that wisdom I want to show you how to build your own satellite-pass predictor. To validate my efforts, I am going to generate the