In article ,
Jerry Stuckle wrote:

After several years of not-so-active activity, I'm wanting to get back
into satellite communications. What are the commonly used programs for
tracking satellites there now?

As a side note - I saw one thread from over a year ago about tracking
programs from the early 80's. I remember those - and how glad we were
to get them!

Jerry-

I recall an MS-DOS program that would display a satellite track on a map
of the world. I don't remember its name, something like SATTRACK or
TRACKSAT. If you can find it, it may still work under MS-DOS.

I moved up to a Macintosh computer before Windows came out. There was a
program called Orbitrack that worked on the Classic Mac operating
systems. I don't think it displayed a map. I used it to print out
azimuth and elevation of satellites, plotted each minute of a satellite
pass, including whether it was visible or not. The latest Mac operating
system does not support the Classic programs.

Doing a web search, I found:
http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/Software/Satellite_tracking/

Another website that you may find interesting:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/ast06may99_1/

That URL appears to be old. NASA used to have a website running the
JPASS and JTRACK programs, but my old links don't work any more.

Fred
K4DII

On 10/12/2012 11:01 PM, Fred McKenzie wrote:
In article ,
Jerry Stuckle wrote:

After several years of not-so-active activity, I'm wanting to get back
into satellite communications. What are the commonly used programs for
tracking satellites there now?

As a side note - I saw one thread from over a year ago about tracking
programs from the early 80's. I remember those - and how glad we were
to get them!

Jerry-

I recall an MS-DOS program that would display a satellite track on a map
of the world. I don't remember its name, something like SATTRACK or
TRACKSAT. If you can find it, it may still work under MS-DOS.

I moved up to a Macintosh computer before Windows came out. There was a
program called Orbitrack that worked on the Classic Mac operating
systems. I don't think it displayed a map. I used it to print out
azimuth and elevation of satellites, plotted each minute of a satellite
pass, including whether it was visible or not. The latest Mac operating
system does not support the Classic programs.

Doing a web search, I found:
http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/Software/Satellite_tracking/

Another website that you may find interesting:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/ast06may99_1/

That URL appears to be old. NASA used to have a website running the
JPASS and JTRACK programs, but my old links don't work any more.

Fred
K4DII


Sorry for the slow response - took a couple of days off

Thanks, Fred, I didn't know about the dxzone page. That's a help.

And yes, I agree about the NASA site. I played with JPass many years
ago - it was pretty good, especially the way it could email you when a
pass was coming over. But it doesn't look like it's been updated since
1999.

Thanks again - I appreciate it.

--
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Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.

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