Gateways
Gateways are the ground half of every feeder link: the sites your satellites downlink through, the anchor points of pass schedules, and the assets whose local geography (terrain, horizon, weather) decides whether a link actually closes. The console treats a gateway as a full operational entity, not a pin on a map: it has telemetry, links, a contact schedule, an elevation mask, and a site view you can descend into.
Use the gateway surfaces when you are planning contacts, diagnosing a feeder link that stopped closing, comparing candidate sites, or explaining to a customer why a pass at 8 degrees elevation is not the same as a pass at 40.
A gateway in focus view: camera at the site, terrain visible, the elevation mask drawn as a horizon ring, feeder links rising to two satellites, and the pass Gantt open in the entity card.
The gateway descent
Clicking a gateway does not teleport the camera. It begins a staged descent from orbit view down to the site, and the final approach deliberately holds until two things are ready: the terrain tiles for the area and the elevation-mask overlay. You arrive at a fully dressed site instead of watching it assemble around you. Interacting with the globe releases the view; the descent is repeatable from search, from the Assets panel, or by asking the assistant to fly there.
At the site, the scene stays honest about weather: gateways whose telemetry reports precipitation grow rain-seeded cumulus overhead. Clouds in the console are a physical signal, not decoration; if you see them over your Ka site, rain fade is in play.
Passes
A pass is one satellite-gateway contact: acquisition of signal (AOS) when the satellite clears the usable horizon, loss of signal (LOS) when it sets. The gateway card's Schedule tab shows passes on a Gantt timeline using the console's standard color language: gold for planned upcoming contacts, bronze for the contact in progress, silver for completed history. The same Gantt appears on the satellite side, so a contact can be read from either end.
Pass computation runs against the same propagated geometry the globe renders, evaluated against the gateway's elevation mask, so the schedule and the picture never disagree. Selecting a pass frames the geometry at that time; scrubbing the timeline through a pass shows the feeder link fade in at AOS, hold through the contact, and fade at LOS.
Elevation masks
An elevation mask is the site's real usable horizon: the minimum elevation angle, per azimuth, at which a satellite becomes reachable. A flat 10-degree assumption is fine on an ocean island and badly wrong in a fjord.
The console builds per-site masks by sweeping the horizon against real terrain when a Cesium ion terrain token is configured, and precomputes the result so the mask renders instantly on focus. Without a terrain token, it falls back to a synthetic horizon profile and labels it as synthetic; the console never presents a guessed mask as measured terrain. The mask appears two ways:
- On the globe, as a horizon ring around the site during gateway focus.
- On the entity card, as an azimuth-elevation plot you can read pass geometry against.
Masks feed pass prediction and coverage scoring, so a mountain to the north shows up as shorter northern passes in the schedule, not just as scenery.
Feeder links
Feeder links connect gateways to satellites over Ka band. The console synthesizes feeder link geometry from feasibility rules rather than trusting topology alone: a link requires at least 10 degrees of elevation at the site and a slant range within roughly 4200 km. Links carry utilization, capacity, latency, SNR, and margin from telemetry where it exists, and the predictions panel forecasts SNR for them.
A geometric line is visibility, not connectivity. The console keeps that distinction: link budgets and rain-degraded analyses (see Simulations and scenarios) are what decide whether a visible link actually closes with margin.
The GSaaS catalog
Beyond your own gateways, the console ships a ground-station-as-a-service catalog: provider sites you can display, compare against, and include in siting analyses. Providers are grouped by vendor in the Assets panel:
| Provider | Notes |
|---|---|
| KSAT | Polar-heavy global network |
| AWS Ground Station | Cloud-colocated sites |
| Leaf Space | European-led network |
| SSC | Swedish Space Corporation global sites |
| Atlas Space Operations | US-led network |
| Viasat | Real-Time Earth network |
| RBC Signals | Aggregated multi-site network |
| Skynopy | LEO-focused network |
GSaaS sites are read-only catalog assets: real locations, display and geometry, no telemetry. They shine in candidate comparisons: "compare my Oslo gateway against the nearest three KSAT sites for contact time" scores every site with the same propagated tracks, windows, and masks.
Common workflows
| Task | How |
|---|---|
| Inspect a site | Click the gateway, or search it; the descent brings you to the dressed site |
| Read today's contact plan | Schedule tab on the gateway card |
| Check why low passes underperform | Elevation mask plot; look for terrain-raised azimuths |
| Compare candidate sites | Ask the assistant to compare sites; existing names resolve, new sites take lat/lon |
| Stress a site against rain | Re-run the comparison with a rain rate; clear-sky and degraded numbers report side by side |
| Plan around an outage | Simulate the gateway outage and read re-homed vs orphaned satellites |
Example scenarios
The fjord problem. A new northern site shows consistently shorter passes than its latitude promised. The operator focuses the gateway, and the elevation mask shows the horizon raised to 14 degrees across the northern azimuths by terrain. The pass schedule was already accounting for it; the original siting spreadsheet was not. The team re-runs the candidate comparison including two GSaaS alternatives before committing antennas.
Explaining a rainy-day SLA miss. A customer asks why throughput dipped on Tuesday. The operator seeks the replay to the dip, sees rain clouds over the serving gateway, opens the feeder link's telemetry against its predicted SNR, and exports the before/after comparison into a report showing rain fade, not fleet degradation, as the cause.