Thank you for reading this.
I'm currently marooned because of flood water, and likely to be so for at least another week, so to pass some time I decided to upgrade my satellite tracking program. Disappointingly, playing with the current satellites in this country is pointless so the programming exercise is purely academic.
Originally, my tracking program displayed the link frequencies but I decided that was unnecessary since the radio has a perfectly good display itself. So to make frequency corrections, due to hardware errors, or to listen to another part of the downlink I simply used the radio's tuning knob. The program detected that the receiver's frequency had changed and calculated a new uplink frequency.
This requires some manual intervention in that I have to stop the automatic tracking, turn the knob and then restart the tracking. This could take a few seconds which would mean that the tracking could be a few seconds behind. The alternative is to click on an up / down tuning arrow which will stop the tracking and adjust the received frequency. Clicking on a restart button would restart the tracking. I think that's the way satpc32 works.
I've probably got too much time on my hands and both methods seem to work equally well. Does one method have an advantage over the other?
The update interval has to be fairly short so that a manual frequency change can be quickly detected. I'm currently updating the radio based on time. The alternative is to update based on frequency, say every time the higher frequency changes by 20Hz. This would lessen the number of radio updates during periods where the Doppler effect is at a minimum but does it matter if the radio is undated unnecessary? The rotator bearing is updated every ten degrees but that's to lessen mechanical fatigue.
Regards, Phil.