Hello,

I work and attend graduate school in Boulder, Colorado. My personal and professional interests include radio propagation, ionosphere dynamics and magnetosphere, ionosphere coupling. I am very new to these topics and still smell turnips.

I am keenly interested in VHF beacons (e.g. VO-52), initially as a hobby. I've even borrowed an ICOM that I have yet to figure out. As part of my graduate curriculum, I am enrolled in an astrodynmics course. The course requires a course project. Until now, I have been dreaming up project ideas in nearly a vacuum. My day job is as a civil servant (ionosonde data manager) and through that role, I've become accustomed to asking scientific and engineering communities, "what is needed?". Thus, I would like to query this wonderful community similarly. What is needed?

I'll proffer a starting line of questioning to get the ball rolling. Given my interest in VO-52 and other VHF beacon LEO satellites, I realize that accurate positioning is detrimental. I've been retrieving TLEs for two weeks now and in that window, VO-52 has had 2 updates with a 10 day cadence. Is ~10 days the usual tracking priority for such satellites? Are there already "good enough" techniques for filling the orbital element gaps? Are there more sophisticated public domain orbit propagation algorithms just waiting to be tried out? The dawn of a new solar cycle (24) is upon us. How does will already employed prediction techniques stand up to the next solar max?

I'm happy to communicate off-line so as not to congest the mailing list traffic. Equally, I'd welcome the opportunity rub elbows with any locals. I have much to learn.

Regards,

Rob p.s. I wrote a small program (Ruby) to grab TLE's from AMSAT http://www.amsat.org/amsat/ftp/keps/current/nasa.all to slowly build my own archive. I could share if interested.