One command, one live Starlink pass over Aberdeen: the whole portfolio in a single view — pass & data rate (A), pre-comp sync cost (B), latency (C), and the report card (D).
Hi all,
For ten weeks this project has grown one piece at a time. Each week I picked one question about a 5G satellite link — is a satellite visible, can we keep it in sync, which one do we hand to, how much data does it deliver, what does the delay cost — built a small tool to answer it, and shipped it as its own thing.
This week I stopped adding pieces and started connecting them.
The result is a single program that runs the whole chain end to end. You give it a location, it reaches out and pulls the live Starlink constellation, finds the best satellite passing overhead, and hands you one report covering everything the last ten weeks worked out separately.
I ran it on a real pass over my Aberdeen station. In one command it told me: the satellite's up for seven and a half minutes, reaching 47° overhead; the link peaks at about 14 Mbps and delivers roughly 557 MB, with half of that arriving in the busiest third of the pass; keeping it synced means correcting the timing about 18 times a second; it was the strongest satellite in view most of the time; and the round-trip delay is small but still enough to trip up 5G's retransmission at higher speeds. Six separate analyses, one report.
Here's the thing I want to flag, because it's a real engineering decision: I deliberately did not jump to building a polished app this week. The hard part of "bringing it all together" was never the buttons and screens — it's whether the pieces actually fit: whether they share the same clock, the same units, the same satellite feeding every step without quiet mismatches. So this week is just the engine, tested and verified on live data, with no interface at all. Next week — the final week — becomes "wrap a nice interface around a working engine," which is a far calmer way to finish than trying to build everything at once against the deadline.
In plain English, if the jargon lost you: For ten weeks I made separate small tools, each answering one question about a satellite internet connection. This week I joined them into a single program: tell it where you are, and it finds a real satellite passing overhead and gives you the complete picture of that pass — signal, data, sync, delay — all at once. I did the "engine" this week on purpose, so that next week I can just build a nice app around something that already works.
Eleven down, one to go. Next week, the flagship — the whole thing, with a face on it.
Code and tests on GitHub: github.com/shaifiqbal/ntn-toolkit
More next week.
Shaif