Morning to the Group,
I am a "newbie" as far as satellites go and having some problems with Orbitron as my tracking software. I realize that the software offered my AMSAT SATpc32 certainly looks like the one to go with or Nova but at this stage of my venture into satellites I wanted to stick with a free piece of software. That being said, here is the problem I am having.
First off my computer is fairly new running XP and 1GB of RAM and my clock is right on with WWV
I have updated Orbitron with the latest TLE's or Keps so they are current
Now when I run predications on Orbitron 3.71 and compare them with the pass predications on the AMSAT web page they are really different ???? not even close, yet when I look at the actual real time position of a satellite say AO51 on both the AMSAT page and my Orbitron they are very very close, in fact look the same to me by eye.
So why are the pass predications so off from each other ????? I assume it must be in my setup in Orbitron but have gone over these several times. I had a VE2 gentlemen who was running Orbitron trying to help me but when he runs his pass predications and compares them to the AMSAT pass predications they are the same ?
Obviously I have something wrong so not sure where to go here, delete Orbitron and start with another download and try again ? that does not seem to likely to be the answer to me ? I also took a look at SATscape as a tracking problem but that seem rather confusing so gave up on that one as could not get it to run right either.
So I am open to some suggestions/advice on Orbitron or any other free tracking software to try and then compare to the AMSAT page to make sure they are the same as far as predications.
73 Gary