The recent thread about tracking BOBCAT-1, got me to thinking of this old script I wrote ages ago, to track satellites in Google Earth. To do this, I wrote a bit of Python that would obtain keps from amsat or space track and then carefully craft and host a kml file locally. The user could then drag this into Google Earth to track in near-realtime. It was configurable and really only driven by one python file and one config file. I had posted about it to the -bb a couple times since then but I hadn't really maintained the project. I found one repository on GitHub, that u0m3 had created. I forked (my own) project a few minutes ago from his repo and figured I could start maintaining it again. I just made the following updates:
- supports amsats latest bare url
- supports the latest spacetrack api
- you can now plot / resolve satellite names via regex (so say all AO-* or STARLINK-*)
If you take it for a spin, let me know what you think:
https://github.com/josepharmbruster/ge-satellite-tracker
The core of this could easily be integrated with rigctl or any other mapping app for tracking purposes, if someone wanted to roll their own.
73's
Joseph Armbruster
KJ4JIO