Are You Using STK Post Processing Scripts? Here's Why You Should...

The STK reporting options are diverse, however do you sometimes find that you need to tweak the output, or completely re-write it for follow-on processing or for customized presentations? With a little bit of scripting knowledge, you can. Here's a good example - from STK, you can create a Lighting Times report. But what I needed, and needed to create every day, was a ‘Lighting Times’ report - in order! Well, I can get everything I need out STK, just not 'in order'. I could manually order the report myself - but that would soon become tedious - so I decided to work smarter, not harder, and I created myself a ‘Post Processing Script’ to do the repetitious work for me. Here is a before and after report:

Here's another Post Processing Script that I use regularly - it takes a report containing Time, Latitude and Longitude and reformats it into and STK External Ephemeris file that can be saved, then used on any vehicle. This is useful for additional analysis. In the example shown below, the original report is a 'Sensor Boresight' report created on a spinning sensor. After post-processing, I can insert the ephemeris file into a vehicle and 'see' what is was pointing at the entire time.

And if you aren't a script writer, you can learn a scripting language in a weekend - or get yourself an intern. You can find more information and downloadable examples, in a variety of scripting languages such as Perl (my favorite), Python, vbs, and Windows batch (not sure why anyone would want to use a batch file – but it is doable)  here:  STK Post-Processing Scripts; and the more information on Report Output Properties in the STK/Help on.