Back in my day, we didn't have over a hundred GNSS satellites, we had Navstar GPS, and sometimes GLONASS. We also had to solve our differential correlation by hand, uphill, both ways... or something.
While not as important anymore due to the plethora of navigation satellites available, planning your data collection campaign around the number of satellites and diversity of location in the sky is important. Trimble made avaiable a Microsoft Silverlight application to help you plan, then they modernised and created their modern Trimble GNSS Planning Website. The main features include:
- Setting your collection location
- Choosing constellations and satellites for inclusion
- Showing time enabled graphs with counts and geometry of satellites in the sky
- Expected Dilution of Precision (DOP) values
- Ionospheric conditions
I figure, I can replicate many of these with my favorite Python libraries and self-host my own GNSS Planning Dashboard. This repository is exactly for that, and here I demonstrate the use of the following libraries in making this platform:
- Streamlit
- Folium and Streamlit-Folium
- Skyfield
- GeoPandas
- SQLAlchemy
- Requests
- Plotly
Future Features:
- Constellation and satellite include/exclude
- Caching satellite calculations
- Add collection sites to database to re-use and cache calculations ahead of access
- Improve location selection map
- Integrate pytzwhere to automate timezone selection
Further future updates:
- DOP predictions
- Ionospheric data integration perhaps from here
Clone the repository locally:
git clone https://github.com/gspeed0689/gnss-planner.git
Change directory inside, and either
uv sync
or
pip install -e .
Activate your virtual environment.
Change directory into gnss-planner and run
streamlit run 00_🛰️_GNSS_Planner.py
On the first page, select your location and time settings.
Set the location by navigating to your area of interest where you will carry out fieldwork, and then press the Update location button.
On the Charts page you will find 3 graphs
The number of satellites visible over time
The altitude of satellites over time
The location of the satellite in the sky over time.
On the Map page, see the satellites and their paths around the world. Avoid this page, it isn't working correctly
I was struggling with the polar skyplot and how to invert the graph, I stumbled upon the library I probably could have just re-used, SatChecker. This project has some example code on their documentation page here on how to stylize their graph, thanks alot I reapplied your code.