What Comms is — spacecraft communications engineering

Comms is the engineering surface for spacecraft and satellite communications: ground stations, antennas, link budgets, active uplinks, and outages.

Tabs:
• **Active Links** — every link currently established between a spacecraft and a ground station.
• **Antennas** — the dishes and arrays at each ground station, with band capabilities and pointing constraints.
• **Link Budgets** — interactive Friis-equation calculator: enter Tx/Rx parameters, get Eb/No verdict and margin live as you type.
• **Outages** — recorded link outages with cause and severity. Critical outages auto-spawn missionAnomalies in the Mission module.
• **Ranging** — two-way ranging data for orbit determination.
• **Stations** — your ground network: DSN, NEN, TDRSS, LunaNet, KSAT, AWS-GS, Viasat, or your own private station.

Comms sits below Mission's pass scheduling. When Mission says "we have a 13-minute window over Goldstone at T+02:14:00", Comms is where you've already proved the link will close at the required data rate.