Documentation
These are the documents the software is written against. They live in the repository so that the version you are reading is the version being implemented — a specification kept somewhere else is a specification that quietly stops being true.
Protocol · v0.1 · frozen
How a receiving station joins the network, declares what it can do, reports its state,
receives work and returns results. Four endpoints, JSON bodies, implementable on a
microcontroller. Includes the registration and recovery flow, the heartbeat and its
listening block, assignment delivery, the observation outcomes, error codes and
the versioning rules. Full
specification on GitHub.
Design
The six platform modules and what each one is allowed to depend on, the protocol boundary beneath them, the independence test, and the rules that keep simulated data distinguishable from measured data. Source document on GitHub.
Design
The PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB schema — core tables, keys, enumerations, hypertables and derived views. Observations are time-series data and are stored as such. Records are immutable once written; corrections are additive, so the earlier report survives as part of the record.
Method
What is claimed, how each claim is tested, and what would falsify it. Covers the four model configurations that get reported, selection bias and the completeness ratio, the silent-satellite confound, temporal splits, and why calibration is treated as more important than accuracy. Written before the models, deliberately.
Reference
Definitions across five domains: orbits and passes, coordinate frames, radio and the station, protocol and platform, evaluation. Start here if a term on any other page is doing more work than it looks like it is.
Record · append-only
Every non-obvious decision, with its date, its status, and the alternatives that were rejected and why. Entries are amended rather than rewritten when they turn out to be wrong, because a log that has never been wrong is not evidence of anything.
Record
What was learned from reading other projects, and what was written independently as a result. One line per item: the date, what was read, what was written, and the licence of the source. No source is copied from a copyleft project into this one.
If you are evaluating whether to implement a station, read the protocol and stop. Nothing else is required to build one.
If you are evaluating the system, read the evaluation methodology first and the architecture second. The methodology states what is being claimed; everything else is machinery for producing evidence about those claims.