LoTW refuses a QSO whose SAT_NAME is not spelled as its accepted list has it - its
own help page gives AO7 against AO-7 as a rejection - so the name we upload decides
whether a contact can ever be confirmed. The old code derived it with
substringBefore('('), which returns the descriptive half of a TLE name rather than
the OSCAR designator: measured against live Celestrak amateur data, 0 of 96
satellites resolved to something LoTW accepts. ASRTU-1 went up as ASRTU-1 where
LoTW wants AO-123.
Keying on the name cannot be made to work, because the sources disagree. Of the 49
satellites carried by both Celestrak amateur and AMSAT nasabare, 33 are named
differently - 43017 is RADFXSAT (FOX-1B) in one and AO-91 in the other, 43700 is
ES'HAIL 2 against QO-100 - so which name a QSO got depended on where the operator
fetched their TLE. The catalogue number is identical everywhere, so the table is
keyed on it and OrbitalPass.catNum is now threaded through to the QSO and persisted.
The name path stays as a fallback for contacts logged before the number was
recorded, and got two fixes of its own: it tries either side of the parentheses
rather than assuming the designator is on the left, and tolerates a differing
separator so RADIO ROSTO (RS15) reaches RS-15. Resolution now returns the list's own
spelling, so Arsene is not uploaded as ARSENE and rejected the same way AO7 would be.
Measured on the same data: 3 names resolved before, 20 by name alone now, 30 with
the catalogue number, and no satellite that used to resolve stopped resolving.
The table gained the nine TEVEL-2 satellites after an audit found them missing.
Every source writes those TEVEL2-N while LoTW has TEV2-N, which stripping separators
does not bridge - TEVEL21 is not TEV21 - so they resolved to nothing at all. They
launched in 2025 and are workable now. Their numbering is not sequential: 63217 is
TEVEL2-1 while 63213 is TEVEL2-4.
All 38 entries were cross-checked two independent ways: every catalogue number
appears in the app's own configured sources under a name consistent with the LoTW
spelling, and ARRL's startDate for each name agrees with the launch year in the
TLE international designator - which is what would catch a number pointing at the
wrong object, since a name can match by luck. Nothing here was typed from memory;
an early hand-written draft had AO-123 as 62690 when it is 61781.
mckero
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