Ha! Didn't know that was a Stargate thing. I've only seen a few episodes.

It's a real-world thing, which is probably where the Stargate writers got it. Precise satellite positions used to be determined by ground stations sending up a pseudorandom stream to an analog transponder and correlating the returned signal to get a delay. Multiple stations give you accurate positions. The USAF had about a dozen stations worldwide for that, and pictures of the locations, from Arctic to tropical island, were a common wall decoration where I worked. Central control was at the now-demolished Blue Cube [1] at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley back then, and moved out to Colorado Springs decades ago.

It's like GPS in reverse. Satellites of that era were rather dumb. The satellite end used is pure analog. The clocks and compute were on the ground. Satellites were told what to do in great detail by the ground, via a labor-intensive process which looked way too much like 1960s NASA well into the 1980s.

Today, Starlink satellites are semi-autonomous. They're kicked off the booster and mostly figure out by themselves where to position and aim. Progress marches on.

[1] https://heritageparkmuseum.org/blog/what-is-the-blue-cube