Satellite Matching

[zikunliu6]

Hello,

This is a fantastic tool for tracking the Starlink satellite! Thanks for opensourcing!

An issue I found when running the script is that the measured satellite trace from gRPC cannot match well with any of the TLE trace. And this happens very often. I am wondering if you faced the same issue before? Any calibration needs to be done such as taking the dish orientation into consideration? Any insights would be greatly helpful. Thanks!

[wdlctc]

Thank you for your interest in the Starlink Trace Tracker tool and for bringing up this issue!

It's a great observation that the measured satellite trace from gRPC sometimes doesn't match well with the predicted TLE traces. This is indeed a common challenge when trying to match real-time measurements with orbital predictions.

Here is a possible reason for TLE Accuracy: The accuracy of the TLE data itself can also impact the matching process. TLEs are predictions based on observations and are subject to some level of uncertainty. The actual satellite position may deviate slightly from the TLE predictions over time. One approach to mitigate this is to use the most recent TLE data available and consider updating the TLEs frequently to minimize the deviation.

To do so, you can run code with a downloading option to download a state-of-art version of TLE python main.py --url

[zikunliu6]

Hi, thanks for your prompt response. Yeah, I have already tried to update the TLE data and still cannot get a good match 50% of the time. For example,

These two pictures represent the common cases of satellite matching from my observation, do you consider such off as acceptable or my results are different from yours? Thanks!

[wdlctc]

Then you can check you location is correctly fetched. We do it on https://github.com/wdlctc/starlink-trace-tracker/blob/main/starlink_match.py#L71, you can try to print it out to see whether it is correct. The elevation_m is sometime not correct when you are located on high elevation.