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Comment by cozzyd | Hacker News Reader

This is tangential, but you seem like you know a lot about this :).

How come I can't easily find a registry of the UP/DL/Beacon transmission frequencies for every satellite. Am I just not looking in the right place? I can find various hobbyist's catalogs, but nothing that looks remotely official. Any satellite with downlinks between 30 MHz and 1.2 GHz is potentially useful for helping to calibrate one or more of the radio neutrino experiments I work on.

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For partially historic and partially current reasons, detailed satellite catalogs are considered militarily sensitive to some degree... not to a huge extent, but to such an extent that it's prevented the formation of an open, international coordinating system for satellites, keeping most of the coordination work done behind closed doors. The closest thing to an "official" international satellite catalog would probably be that maintained by USSTRATCOM but it's post-facto. UN Space Affairs facilitates coordination and has a catalog but it does not pretend to be complete and has only limited information.

A good source of downlink information is the FCC International Bureau records of satellite ground stations in the US.

Yeah I can find TLE catalogs easily enough (celestrack and space-track) and it seems NORAD IDs are an almost standard. The FCC ground station list that I can find has some of them, but lacks a lot of notable ones (NOAA satellites, MUOS, Gonets...).

It is available on the ITU website. You will have satellite names (which should be similar to what you'll see in space-track, most of the time). I believe you need to pay to have access to those, but when you have a direct link to a specific satellite anybody can read it.

Also note that this shows licences, not actual use. You can have a satellite licenced to a particular frequency but not using it.

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