Great stuff, Mark. I'm an old, dusty assembler, and later a C programmer. Used to program for fun, then for profit, then after a few years of life I looked around and the art had snuck ahead of me.
I used to hack up the PREDICT code for my own devious purposes, and just to have fun with the source.
Your blog post reminded me of how fun it is to cobble together one's own code to solve a particular problem. Keep it up!
Rich, N8UX
Mark wrote:
You can find some of the simple example code at my blog:
http://brainwagon.org/2009/09/27/how-to-use-python-to-predict-satellite-loca...
I'll probably be porting all of my existing scripts to use this soon. In the mean time, if you have a similar task, you might look to it to solve your custom satellite prediction problems.
73 Mark K6HX _______________________________________________
Awesome stuff!! I'll have to check out this library tonight. I started hacking at something similar but started digging into the internals of SGP4/SDP4, then got distracted and never finished. If you have a rotator, it'd be a cool quick project to slap pyserial on there and control your rotator. It'd be pretty awesome to have a Kep to Rotator Control in about 10 lines of code :-) Joe
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 4:12 AM, Rich Dailey (Gmail) [email protected]wrote:
Great stuff, Mark. I'm an old, dusty assembler, and later a C programmer. Used to program for fun, then for profit, then after a few years of life I looked around and the art had snuck ahead of me.
I used to hack up the PREDICT code for my own devious purposes, and just to have fun with the source.
Your blog post reminded me of how fun it is to cobble together one's own code to solve a particular problem. Keep it up!
Rich, N8UX
Mark wrote:
You can find some of the simple example code at my blog:
http://brainwagon.org/2009/09/27/how-to-use-python-to-predict-satellite-loca...
I'll probably be porting all of my existing scripts to use this soon. In the mean time, if you have a similar task, you might look to it to solve your custom satellite prediction problems.
73 Mark K6HX _______________________________________________
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Joseph Armbruster wrote:
Awesome stuff!! I'll have to check out this library tonight. I started hacking at something similar but started digging into the internals of SGP4/SDP4, then got distracted and never finished. If you have a rotator, it'd be a cool quick project to slap pyserial on there and control your rotator. It'd be pretty awesome to have a Kep to Rotator Control in about 10 lines of code :-)
Joe
That reminds me, I should give thanks to Howard, G6LVB. I've never met Howard, but his G6LVB tracker project first put me onto G3RUH's Plan 13 work. Howards PIC based tracker implements Plan 13 to do automatic antenna guiding, and seems very cool.
I have actually experimented with using my library to predict and compensate for Doppler shift using my FT-817. I used pyserial to send out frequency change commands as documented in the FT-817 manual. It worked reasonably well. For example, following is a simple visual display of a pass of the three small satellites COMPASS-1, CUTE-1.7 APD and SEEDS that I did back on Jun 13, 2008.
WARNING: this JPG is 1.7Mb, and 1600x8000 or so in size. Don't blame me if your computer melts trying to display it.
http://brainwagon.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/three.jpg
You can see COMPASS-1 at the beginning, with its sharply whistling tones. Then CUTE will step in, and finally SEEDS. You can clearly see the steps in frequency every second or so.
If you'd rather have the audio, you can get it here:
http://brainwagon.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/threefer-20080613.mp3
73 Mark K6HX
participants (3)
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Joseph Armbruster -
Mark VandeWettering -
Rich Dailey (Gmail)