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| Reviews Summary for wxtrack Satellite tracking software |
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Reviews: 1
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Average rating: 5.0/5
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MSRP: $free or donate for extra facilit
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Description: In the early days of my interest in weather satellites, I was not familiar with the sorts of images that might be obtained from satellites, and it was the depths of winter so the amount of daylight information was minimal - hence the need for a ground track prediction program. There was also the problem that whilst information was readily available for the NOAA satellites, there is a great scarcity of information on Meteor and Resurs satellites, not to mention less frequent visitors like Okean and Sich. I started out using the WinOrbit program, which is an excellent piece of freeware, but I didn't like its multiple window arrangement. I could find no software that did ground track prediction.
My starting point was the Turbo Pascal software that Dr T S Kelso (at: http://www.celestrak.com) chose to make available. Once I had understood this, and reproduced the test cases correctly, I was able to extend the software into the more object-oriented model used by Borland's Delphi, and predict orbits. It took a little more maths to predict the ground track of the sensor in the satellite - think of it as a broom sweeping across the ground.
The final step was to display the ground track in a meaningful way. Fortunately, I knew that there was a database on the Web giving the height all over the world at 5 minute intervals - not too dissimilar to the satellite resolution. Once I had worked out the maths, I combined the ground sweep with another program I had written to produce what looks like a map page tailored to the exact co-ordinates sweep out by a satellite during its pass. The final problem to solve before distributing the program was how to distribute the topography database. It is 18MB uncompressed, 11MB as a Zip file. Even if I gave the URL, I know this size of download would put people off. So I decided that since absolute accuracy wasn't essential, I could simply distribute the database as a large image, which could be compressed into a JPEG for distribution. By choosing carefully, I created a high-resolution and low-resolution map that occupies only 98KB and 34Kb respectively. These images are 1800 x 900, and 900 x 450 pixels in size.
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Product is in production.
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More info: http://www.david-taylor.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/software/wxtrack.htm
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write your own review of the wxtrack Satellite tracking software.
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ACARSNUT
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Rating: 5/5
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Jul 7, 2008 11:28
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The best sat tracking ever
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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I have used orbitron and others.But none come close to wxtrack.you have 3 seperate maps.Keeps the maps alittle cleaner that way.not so many sats on 1 map.I use one for hams sats and the other for weather sats and the third for the iss and shuttle.You can make your own icons for each satellite.Useing any icon maker software for windows.you can see my iss icon on his web site.unlike orbitron that uses the same for all sats.you can also get his kepler manager software to download new keps and put into the wxtrack folder.I dont use it with a tracker so dont know how good that part is.But this software is the greatest of all of them.
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