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Space

Oscar-40 Ham Satellite Transmitting Again 59

Posted by timothy from the dit-dittee-dit-dit-deet dept.
Bruce Perens K6BP writes: "The Phase 3-D Amateur satellite, called "Oscar 40" now that it is in orbit, is back on the air. A ground station sent a reset command and a command to turn on a microwave transmitter, which worked on the first attempt. The transmitter is sending an unmodulated carrier until telemetry software is reloaded, but it's clear from the doppler shift of the signal and the loss-of-signal time as the transmitter crosses the horizon that the signal is coming from the satellite's orbit. The ground controller will now reload the flight computer software and bootstrap the main flight computer. It will take a while to reload both computers and to investigate problems with the satellite, as this is complicated by the attitude and orbit of the satellite - right now it's not actively stabilized and is only pointing the antennas toward the Earth during part of its orbit, and of course it's only above the horizon from any ground controller's perspective during part of each orbit." Read on for a bit more on this promising news."

"A board of inquiry will convene to investigate the loss-of-signal incident and to change procedures to avoid another such incident with this or a future Amateur satellite. General information about the satellite can be found at www.amsat.org. The following announcement is from www.amsat-dl.org:

The Santa Claus brought AO40 back On Air! At 2000-12-25 21:45 command station Ian, ZL1AOX sent a RESET command through L-band and an initialization block to switch the S2 S-Band transmitter On. Just after the first attempt the S2 beacon came on 2401.305 MHz, Signal was about S5 to 6 which was comparable to when S2 was heard last during testing The S2 beacon produced a steady signal and from the doppler wobbling it is also clear that it is in fact coming from AO-40. Ian ZL1AOX reported that he was able to copy and observe (with Spectrogram) the S2 beacon. His LOS time was 2000-12-26 03:45:15. Predicted LOS from NORAD set #12 keps gave 5 secs later. Approx distance was 61,470 Kms. Today, 2000-12-26 at about 16:05 UTC, ZL1AOX will acquire AO-40 shortly after perigee with a reasonably good squint angle. He will than start reloading the IPS software. Until than the beacon will not carry any telemetry, just a carrier. Once the bootloader for IPS is up, you will see "X" blocks in the telemetry until IPS is completely loaded... (Thanks to DB2OS for this information)."
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Oscar-40 Ham Satellite Transmitting Again More

Oscar-40 Ham Satellite Transmitting Again

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  • I mean, who controls it? A corp? Open Source Satellite or something?

  • Re:Question About This Article (Score:3)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Tuesday December 26, 2000 @11:21AM (#540204) Homepage Journal
    A bunch of radio hams built a satellite, with some very cool stuff on it, and got it launched into orbit. Corporations and governments aren't the only ones who can get access to space and do useful things with it. Parallels with our "Open Source" projects are obvious, some Free Software was used to develop the satellite software, and some Free Software developers are participating in the project. A good place to start reading about the Amateur space program and its many successes since 1962 is at www.amsat.org .

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • very very good news.. alot of time, money (a little of mine,) and hard work went into the sat. Does it strike anyone as funny that a bunch of hams can get this kind of stuff to work but nasa looses probe after probe after probe ?

    -neil

    "Now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
  • I have been waiting for "Phase III" to be operational for years. My heart sank when I heard that it "died" when it reached orbit. Maybe they will have this thing up and going by Dayton 2001 [hamvention.org] :)

  • Ham radio operators around the world. It was built and financed by ham clubs and launched by an Ariane 5 as a hitch-hiker with another (paying) satellite. Ariane (and most other boosters) are built to loft a fixed weight, so if the main payload isn't heavy enough (almost always the case) you either load hitch-hikers or you load ballast. Some of the development was hosted on Debian and the parallels to our volunteer projects are obvious.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • WHY - bacuse it is a good hack. (Score:5)

    by cpuffer_hammer ( 31542 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2000 @11:30AM (#540208) Homepage
    The HAM (Amateur radio) community. Has a long history of building its own satellites. They are put in orbit by NASA on rockets that are being tested. Many of these satellites have been lost to launch problems.
    There is a lot of similarity between the Hacker and the HAM communities in fact some of the first networking code in LINUX is the amateur packet radio code.
  • Amsat - the amateur sattelite corp. - kind of an open-source sattelite corp. run by radio hams - check out www.amsat.org [amsat.org]

  • Re: From amsat.org (Score:5)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Tuesday December 26, 2000 @11:31AM (#540210) Homepage Journal
    InstantTrak is a ground application distributed by AMSAT as a fund-raiser, for people who want to track the satellite (using windows, I think) so that they can communicate with it. But there are a lot of free applications to do this, too. Debian distributes at least one, and has a good collection of free ham radio apps.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Yes it is a corp (Score:3)

    by fatboy ( 6851 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2000 @11:31AM (#540211)
    Yes it is a corp, the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation. See http://www.amsat.org

  • The most important thing about this is the common man getting something into space. Space needs to be available to everyone, not just Governments and corporations. If this attempt had failed miserably, it would have had a similar effect to Challenger, I believe. People would have frozen on the idea of trying to launch another, and they'd sure as hell use it as precident if a person wanted to go to space...
  • Believe it or not, there are some cool volunteer projects out in the world other than Linux :-) . This story is about the ham radio space program. Look through the articles at www.amsat.org .

    Bruce

  • I looked on the amsat site and can't find anything clearly stating what the point is-- is it just to be cool, ie like a deluxe model airplane, or does it have some special mission, purpose, or function?

    I wonder-- will Ariane 5 use anything as ballast? If I wanna send a ham sandwich into space (to be cool) would they do it?

    W
    -------------------
  • this is complicated by the attitude and orbit of the satellite

    It was obvious from the beginning, the satellite it's a bad boy and doesn't have any consideration to earth's orders. He doesn't want to boot, he'd prefer tenniss', going to a higher orbit? Common on... it's warmer here...

    Last days satellites are so respectful as the old ones. AI brought them to an undesirable stage...

    --ricardo

  • Whew! (Score:4)

    by TWX_the_Linux_Zealot ( 227666 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2000 @11:42AM (#540216) Journal
    whew! I was afraid that we'd have to send up four old men into space to stabilize it and hope they don't find the nukes!

    "Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."

  • Re:good news (Score:3)

    by drwho ( 4190 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2000 @11:43AM (#540217) Homepage Journal
    Actually, there have been many failures for both amsat and for nasa, and others as well. This is very difficult stuff to get right. While no doubt some improvements can be made in both amsat and nasa, I think they've both done a great job.

    While there has been some crossover between the free software movement and amateur radio, there needs to be more. I think that both groups can learn from each other. I'd like to create an atmosphere where ham projects (schematics, etc) are published under a GPL. Software should come to
    Linux first (Not trying to get into a religious war here: its just because BSDs and Solaris can run Linux bins). At least, help get ms-dos & ms-win packages to run properly under emulators.

    Many people in the free software movement are involved because they value freedom from control by corporations. They like the fact that they can get their hands into the workings and customize and improve the design. Much of the Ham community has the same type of do-it-yourself devotion.

    At least one linux distribution has to serve the needs of ham radio operators. I know there is some effort by Debian, but the results are buggy. All of the various ham utilities that are for ms-dos and windows need to be ported to Linux and organized in a reasonable fashion. Once this happens, Linux will start to become more prevalent in the ham community.

  • It is a relay satellite. It receives ham signals and re-transmits them. You should be able to work the world with a walkie-talkie and a handheld beam antenna. It also carries an orbit-to-ground laser communications experiment, a GPS experiment developed by Bdale Garbee of Debian fame, and a few TV cameras.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Good to hear! (Score:4)

    by volsung ( 378 ) <stan@mtrr.org> on Tuesday December 26, 2000 @11:55AM (#540219)
    This is great news! I know how nerve-racking it can be when a satellite seems to have failed. (In my university's case, it never came back to life: ASUSat1 Home Page [asu.edu])

    As a side question: What was the reasoning behind making the bootloader only turn the carrier on? We decided to make ASUSat1 transmit sensor readings after booting from the ROM. We never got in contact with it long enough to transmit new software, but two other hams received telemetry packets which they forwarded to us. This provided invaluable information when we were trying to figure out what went wrong.

    Was the bootloader made as minimal as possible to make software verification easier?

  • The fact is that guns kill people efficiently. Knives kill people, blunt objects kill people, guns are just more efficient.

    But here is the deal, it is not the tool it is the society. Until we have a society that rasies all people to value all forms of human life, these incidents are going to keep repeating themselves. Happy Holidays and a merry Children Get Gifts Day!!!

  • There are a ton of reasons, but the main one is education. First, anyone with a ham license can use these satellites. They are actually very easy to use and it does not require large antenna arrays consisting of 20 foot dishes or millions of dollars of equipment to use them. I have talked through the birds using only a small off the shelf handie talkie and a mobile antenna - total cost for all the equipment was about $500.

    These are not just "things slopped together". A whole hell of a lot of engineering goes into them, and there really is not much of a difference between the hamsats and the ones put up by megacorp. They have Earth locators on them. Some sats, like WO-18 had video cameras. Other sats like DO-17 had voice encoders (which did not work for some reason) but would orbit and send down telemetry. Even though you could not use DO-17 for communcation, it was probably the most awesome of the hamsats at the time. I was able to listen to it go overhead without even having an antenna on the receiver, and was able to decode the telemetry packets when I put a rubber duckie antenna on the thing.

    Check out the amsat.org web site some more. There are links to things like the University of Surrey satellites and the aformentioned WO-18 made by Weber University.

    73 DE NV0U
  • yeah, everyone knows that they should have only left the scene when Leo died anyway.. I'da paid to watch that 25 times! ;)

    Justin
  • Except that when you go nuts with a knife you may kill one person or two before you're disarmed but not bloody seven! Explain to me please how this guy would have managed to kill seven people had he not been able to obtain a semiautomatic gun?

  • And now it's been rebooted... (Score:3)

    by MaggieL ( 10193 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2000 @12:06PM (#540224)
    ...and the telemetry is running again. Before people ask, the main controller is a radiation-hardened RCA COSMAC 1802 running IPS, which is fundamentally a multitasking threaded interpreter similar to FORTH. There is also a StrongARM on board as a demonstration project, but it is not tasked with anything mission-critical.

    Those of us in the amateur radio satellite community have gone for a hell of a ride over the last few weeks, and it's good to see things looking up a little. (Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk)

    73 de Maggie KB3DXS, ARRL 39280, AMSAT 32844

  • Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people.

    Or something

    Rich

  • since putting a satalite in a specific orbit around a known body(Tarra Firma) is pretty trivial compared to sending probes into space, no its not funny.This is a clear(and in this case unwarrented) attack on NASA, designed to provoke an angry response from Nerds who understand what NASA is up against every day.
    In short sir, you are a troll
  • firat of all, you are off topic.
    second, you need to replace the word efficiently with easy. A sword can kill you just as efficiently as a gun(more so in some cases), but you have to have skill. the skill needed to use a gun is almost 0. Thats why its called "The Great Equallizer" A 90 year old woman can defend herself from a 6'9" muscle bound assailant.
  • Neve mind that. Has anyone got any good jokes yet? Shame the companyy couldn't have been called "NASN" or something (need another seven nerds" or something. Or if he'd have got another 2, we could have had a kill -9 joke.

    I hear they used to be a recruitment firm. Obviously, personnel misunderstood when told they needed a headhunter.

    Rich

  • if the main payload isn't heavy enough (almost always the case) you either load hitch-hikers or you load ballast
    Oooh! How much weight are we talking about, here? In the hundreds, or perhaps thousands of pounds? I know that amateur satellite stuff is important, but shouldn't it be a higher priority to launch Steve Ballmer into space? We could strap him to an Ariane 5 as extra dead weight, and then after the regular payload is deployed, the rocket could continue on, hurling Mr. Ballmer into the sun. It would solve several problems:
    • Provide the correct amount of payload weight on the Ariane 5
    • Remove an unwanted pest from the Earth
    • Add a few thousand years' worth of fuel to our sun's life

    --
  • I am a Brit as it happens. But I am living in the USA and entitled to have guns (need a ccw permit as appropriate). For what it's worth, I'm not anti-gun (Though i wouldn't want them legalised in the UK). Gun ownership is enshrined in the US constitution and as such, it would be wrong to try and outlaw them.

    I am pro humor however and my previous post awas a joke.

    Rich

  • What was his excuse for having such an arsenal?

    The right to bear arms is a cornerstone of the political foundation of the USA. He does not need an "excuse"

    Rich

  • BTW, please try and get it right. It's edgewater thechnologies, not edge technologies. And their web site has been "slashdotted" since about 15 minutes after it hit the news.

    Rich

  • One word: alohanet

    Your Working Boy,

  • Re:Good to hear! (Score:3)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Tuesday December 26, 2000 @12:38PM (#540234) Homepage Journal
    I don't know why the bootloader is so rudimentary. But note that the main flight computer has a silicon-on-sapphire CPU and the boot ROMs would probably have to be just as exotic to stand the radiation. That means you could easily pay $20,000 for a 16K ROM, no kidding. Rad-hard 74xx logic costs at least $200/chip. The RAM is not rad-hard, an active "scrubbing" routine repairs single-bit errors before they grow too large to correct.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • I just hope... (Score:3)

    by otis wildflower ( 4889 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2000 @12:42PM (#540235) Homepage
    ... that Dr. Evil doesn't go trying to snag any of its parts for any evil hacking projects..

    (and yes, one can perform evil hacks.. Just ask Bill Gates.. Parlaying a buggy and unoriginal OS into a multi-billion-dollar company qualifies as both a huge hack and amazingly evil.. Just imagine: if Bill Gates can do that much with windows, what Dr. Evil could do with a StrongARM CPU and a FORTH interpreter ;)

    "Wow honey, that looks like a giant pair of.."

    Your Working Boy,
  • The common man is not necessarily stupid. Hams will use this bird while they flip hamburgers on their way through college. Although he's a pretty unusual guy, I do know about at least one sysadmin who is a moonlighting rocket scientist on this project.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Well, he shot and killed seven people. There were no other injuries besides so that seems to imply a pretty good shot. Most likely he freaked out I guess (well, I admit that going around shooting your coworkers is not exactly stable but still). The fact that he didn't shoot himself would seem to support this. The other option is that he was overpowered. Rifles are crap at close range. A large guy jumping him from behind would likely be enough to end things. I'm sure we will hear more as time goes on anyway.

    Rich

  • The 2M beacon will be down for an extended period. It is "off limits" until they determine what caused the computers to crash. They appear to have lost some current sensors and some temperature sensors, and this sounds like a short circuit to me.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • So that there is little-to-nothing that can fail in the event of a reboot. This is firmware that *MUST* be as close to 100% reliable as humanly possible. There's no opportunity to flash new code into rom, after all. It simply has to be able to bring the satellite into a known safe state capable of responding to ground commands.

    Once the satellite is in a known "safe" state, more capable software can be uplaoded into the flight computer. Which is what the controllers are doing.

    As far as I know, most amateur satellites have followed this approach since at least AO-10. I know the microsat design does based on my experience with AO-27 and (peripherally) with IO-26. And yes, the ROMs on AO-27 were horribly expensive.

    KA1LM
  • You forgot Mao.

    I prefer mine with ketchup

    But the point the previous poster was making was wrong as you say. Those acts required some serious planning and intent. On the other hand, a gun is not necessary to perform this kind of thing. Just look at comparable incidents in UK: The guy who went mad in a church with a sword, the guy with the machete in the infant school. And even with guns under much heavier control, Michael Ryan in Hungerford (sorry, I don't recall the fatality figures).

    But in the end anyway, gund were designed into the American political system. As part of the designed mecahnism, you can't just take them out without upsetting the whole thing. So the only reasonable way to get rid of guns would be to sump the whole constitution. And that would require revolution. And that would likely require... guns.

    Rich

  • It also carries [...] a few TV cameras.

    You mean cameras pointing out at space/earth/itself? If so, does it transmit them to Earth via SSTV?

    --
  • Add a few thousand years' worth of fuel to our sun's life

    But our sun runs on fusion!

    ...

    Whoa, wait just a minute... are you telling me that our sun runs on hot air?!

    --
  • This story hasn't hit the front page yet. Is it not "News for Nerds"?

    Rich

  • Re:Good to hear! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Two points.

    1) The RAM *is* rad-hard, donated by GEC-Plessey. It is backed up by error detecting/correcting hardware as you mentioned.

    2) There is no bootloader. The 1802 COSMAC CPU chip has a "DMA" mode which is used to load some code directly into RAM which is then executed.

    Enjoy!

    Lyle
  • before you run your mouth about a "Corporation" check out http://www.dict.org/ [dict.org] and look up the word "Corporation" .. or just as well: get your Websters dictionary out!
  • I heard on NPR that there were rumors of imminent layoffs at Edgewater. Management denied these rumors, of course. Well, that's probably true, since they just reduced the headcount today...
  • I'm sure you could send the ham sandwich, but it would be very expensive to do so (I think $20/kg or something like that), and I'm sure it would have to pass some rigorous pre-flight engineering tests (to make sure it doesn't ooze mayonnaise over the other loads, etc.)
  • I think he's saying that Ballmer (two Ls?) is full of hydrogen. Just like the Hindenburg: Big, slow, and flaming.
  • before you run your mouth about a "Corporation" check out http://www.dict.org/ and look up the word "Corporation" .. or just as well: get your Websters dictionary out!

    Watch it with that hair trigger, you need to put your attitude in check. I know exactly what a corporation is, it's a legal entity.(without the need of a dictionary, mind you) I happen sit on the board of directors of the coporation I am the vice president of.

  • Warning: I'm human. Sometimes stuff I post here is wrong. Use your head. Question authority.

    ...but if authority answers, will you listen?

  • If this attempt had failed miserably, it would have had a similar effect to Challenger, I believe. People would have frozen on the idea of trying to launch another, and they'd sure as hell use it as precident if a person wanted to go to space...

    Perhaps.

    But AO-40 isn't the first bird to be launched and lost. One of the earlier phase-III birds went into the ocean (along with the primary payload) when the booster had to be destroyed due to a launch-time systems failure. And one of the PacSats (AO-15?) that was part of the "Magnificent Seven" launch went smoothly into orbit and was never heard of again.

    The loss of AO-40 would be a terrible blow to the Amateur Satellite community, but I know that construction of the next bird would begin within days.

    73, de Gus 8P6SM (Eight Papa Six Sly Mongoose)
  • I looked on the amsat site and can't find anything clearly stating what the point is-- is it just to be cool, ie like a deluxe model airplane, or does it have some special mission, purpose, or function?

    I suppose you could say the purpose is to expand the boundaries of human knowledge in the art of construction and operation of space-based communication systems. Quite a bit of modern-day space communications technology was developed on amateur platforms. For instance, I think AMSAT were the first to conceive of and build a "mating ring" bird, a technique that is rapidly gaining ground. (AO-40 is such a bird.)

    But of course, a communications satellite is also a very cool "deluxe model airplane" too!

    I wonder-- will Ariane 5 use anything as ballast? If I wanna send a ham sandwich into space (to be cool) would they do it?

    If you think you could construct a ham sandwich to the stringent standards required by ESA, then you should construct one and submit it. Personally I think you would have some difficulty getting it to pass the clean-room standards. Oh, and do you have a vaccuum chamber that you can test it in?

  • dit-dittee-dit-dit-deet dept, wtf?

    the dah-dit-dah-dit-dah-dah-dit-dah dept makes much more sense.

  • Well there is more to it then a good hack.

    The reason that they do this is most of the satsellites repeat 2meter radion. Alone, 2m doesn't have very good range. But bounce that baby off a satellite and I can talk to europe, only for a few mins, but it's enough to make contact and have a small conversation.

    And for somebody with a tech no-code license, to beable to say that I talked to europe on my little hand held ham radio with 5watts, that's quite a cool thing to do.

    -- N1UEV
    --

  • I suspect the video formats are digital.

    Bruce

  • Yes it is a legal entity. However you fucking idiot, AMSAT is a non-profit legal corporation.

    I don't see what it's profit status has to do with the fact it's a corporation. Someone asked if it was a corporation and I responded to that question.

    Are you claiming to be an Officer of AMSAT?

    No, I stated that I was an officer of a corporation to show that I _KNOW_ what a corporation is.Just so it is clear, I do not have ANYTHING to do with AMSAT. I have donated a very small amount of money to them but that is because I had a few spare bucks and think Phase 3D is a great project.
  • My God! Is the 1802 still being made? My very first computer was a bread-boarded device using the 1802 and 256 bytes of RAM. This, of course, was way back in '77.
  • can someone please moderate down all these off topic posts?
  • Although I have passed the 20 WPM exam from an ARRL volunteer examiner team, I've never used Morse on the air and am the founder of No-Code International [nocode.org].

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • That means you could easily pay $20,000 for a 16K ROM, no kidding. Rad-hard 74xx logic costs at least $200/chip. The RAM is not rad-hard, an active "scrubbing" routine repairs single-bit errors before they grow too large to correct.

    Do you mean rad-hard as in "can take a rad hit, and then read back the old data later", or "read proper data durning a rad hit"?

    If it just has to work OK after a rad hit a masked ROM is inharently rad hard (it isn't a set of fuses that can be blown, it is a set of WIRES). Masked ROMs use to be quite cheep in reasonable quantity (100+). They also use to have wonderful density and speed. However MROM has lost a lot of research funds as flash has basicly eaten 90% if it's market (and even more severly into EEPROM). I think MROM is not only used when cost is a huge issue, and changes are not beleved to be needed (like maybe by Handspring...). You may have to set the way-back machine to about 1994 for memory size, but that is still a lot better then 16Kbytes!

    As long as you want masked ROMs smaller then about 16Mbits (2Mbytes) they should be pretty cheep. Like cheep enough to go into Super Nintendo cartrages (or at least N64 -- I think SNES made do with far far far smaler cartrages)

  • On http://www.amsat.org/amsat/ftpsoft.html we see, among the other items: "Software for Linux

    DOVE (7K)

    DOVE-OSCAR-17 telemetry decoding program for Linux. Outputs to screen or text file. Pre-compiled in a.out format. Includes a man page. Written by John A. Magliacane, KD2BD.

    KEPGEN (18K)

    Simple program to generate 2-line element sets from keyboard input. Pre-compiled in a.out format. Includes a man page. Written by John A. Magliacane, KD2BD.

    Microsat Groundstation for Linux (121K)

    A complete suite of groundstation software for operation on the Pacsats. Requires Linux with the AX.25 protocol package from Alan Cox, GW4PTW, added to the kernel. Includes source code but no executables. This version has been converted to use the Athena Widgets by Jonathan, G4KLX. The original programs were written by John Melton, G0ORX/N6LYT.

    PB and PG for Linux (39K)

    A complete suite of groundstation software for operation on the Pacsats. Includes features for unattended operation, such as automatic upload and download requests and persistent requests for directory fills. Requires Linux kernel version 2.0.24 or higher and the AX.25 protocol package. Runs in text mode (no X Window System required) under ncurses. Includes source code but no executables. Written by Bent Bagger, OZ6BL, Peter Scott Bentsen, OZ2ABA, and others, based on XPB and XPG by John Melton, G0ORX/N6LYT.

    PREDICT Version 2.1.1 (264K)

    PREDICT is an easy to use, ncurses-based satellite tracking/orbital prediction program developed for the Linux operating system. It allows users to track satellites in earth orbit in real-time, or make orbital predictions in advance of their approach. A unique voice mode allows azimuth and elevation headings of a satellite to be articulated to a ground-based observer through a soundcard in real-time to aid in locating and identifying satellites through optical means. PREDICT also tracks positions of the Sun and Moon, and provides Doppler shift and path loss calculations for analyzing radio communication paths between satellites and earth-based ground stations. PREDICT can export real-time tracking data to client programs using UDP socket-based connections. PREDICT requires ncurses version 4.2 or higher and the Linux pthreads library. PREDICT was written by John A. Magliacane, KD2BD. Further information is available at the PREDICT Home Page.

    SatTrack 3.1.5 (558K)

    Real-time orbit simulation program with color graphics displays for Unix and Linux systems running X11R5. Controls antennas and radios. Also features a batch mode for prediction of passes over specified ground stations. Includes source code in C. Written by Manfred Bester, W6/DL5KR.

    UO11 (11K)

    UoSAT-OSCAR-11 telemetry decoding program for Linux. Outputs to screen or text file. Pre-compiled in a.out format. Includes a man page. Written by John A. Magliacane, KD2BD."

    --- Also there is: "Source Code

    These files contain source code applicable to a variety of computers. Be sure to also scan the other listings for the word "source", since many of the computer-specific programs come with source code that can be adapted to other computers.

    2LIN2KEP (43K)

    Converts a file of NASA-format 2-line Keplerian element sets into AMSAT verbose format. Includes BASIC source and an .EXE file for IBM PC. Written by Richard W. L. Limebear, G3RWL.

    Selecting Orbits (5K)

    BASIC listings associated with the article "Selecting Orbits for Radio Amateur Satellite Missions" by Martin Davidoff, K2UBC. Article appeared in the Proceedings of the 6th AMSAT-UK Colloquium (1991) and in Satellite Operator, February 1995.

    N3EMO's Satellite Tracking Program (32K)

    Satellite tracking in C by N3EMO.

    Moon Tracking (4K)

    Prints azimuth and elevation for the Moon at fixed intervals. Source code in BASIC for the IBM PC. Originally written by WB7CCI (now W7GJ). This version by Richard W. L. Limebear, G3RWL. TRACKER is an updated version by the original author (executable form only).

    Satellite Education News Tracker (17K)

    Command-line tracking program in C. Fixed for Y2K (+bugs) by Paul Williamson, KB5MU.

    SatTrack 3.1.5 (558K)

    Real-time orbit simulation program with color graphics displays for Unix and Linux systems running X11R5. Controls antennas and radios. Also features a batch mode for prediction of passes over specified ground stations. Includes source code in C. Written by Manfred Bester, W6/DL5KR.

    PREDICT Version 2.1.1 (264K)

    PREDICT is an easy to use, ncurses-based satellite tracking/orbital prediction program developed for the Linux operating system. It allows users to track satellites in earth orbit in real-time, or make orbital predictions in advance of their approach. A unique voice mode allows azimuth and elevation headings of a satellite to be articulated to a ground-based observer through a soundcard in real-time to aid in locating and identifying satellites through optical means. PREDICT also tracks positions of the Sun and Moon, and provides Doppler shift and path loss calculations for analyzing radio communication paths between satellites and earth-based ground stations. PREDICT can export real-time tracking data to client programs using UDP socket-based connections. PREDICT requires ncurses version 4.2 or higher and the Linux pthreads library. PREDICT was written by John A. Magliacane, D2BD. Further information is available at the PREDICT Home Page.

    STP: Simple Tracking Program (137K)

    Simple tracking program run from the command line. Computes AOS/LOS tables, tables or realtime text displays of satellites, the Sun, and the Moon, and reads NASA format Keplerian element files. Includes source code in C for PC or UNIX. See also these additional files (52K). Written by Christie Harper, KD4QIO.

    Caution: this program has problems with Year 2000 dates, and the author no longer provides support.

    Microsat Groundstation for Linux (121K)

    A complete suite of groundstation software for operation on the Pacsats. Requires Linux with the AX.25 protocol package from Alan Cox, GW4PTW, added to the kernel. Includes source code but no executables. This version has been converted to use the Athena Widgets by Jonathan, G4KLX. The original programs were written by John Melton, G0ORX/N6LYT.

    PB and PG for Linux (41K)

    A complete suite of groundstation software for operation on the Pacsats. Includes features for unattended operation, such as automatic upload and download requests and persistent requests for directory fills. Requires Linux kernel version 2.0.24 or higher and the AX.25 protocol package. Runs in text mode (no X Window System required) under ncurses. Includes source code but no executables. Written by Bent Bagger, OZ6BL, Peter Scott Bentsen, OZ2ABA, and others, based on XPB and XPG by John Melton, G0ORX/N6LYT.

    WPRAIRIE 2.1 (166K)

    Station control program for use with WinOrbit 2.2 or later on Windows 3.1 or 95 (but not Windows NT). Controls rotors through a Prairie Digital board or a custom serial port controller. Tunes radios (FT-736R, Kenwood, up/down buttons) through serial or parallel ports or the Prairie Digital board. Receives information from WinOrbit via DDE. Alpha test software, with Visual BASIC source code included. Written by Carl Gregory, K8CG. See also PLAN-13 from the collection of articles by G3RUH. It includes source code in BASIC, with lots of explanation."

    ---

    By the way, for those who ask (in essence): Why bother with amateur satelites?

    I'd just like to suggest that it's no different than the Open Source movement, in one way:

    It's a good way for people with genuine interest to get into the field by getting their hands dirty and trying to make contributions.

    What better way to learn about just about anything, i.e. besides building one and/or working with it?

    Still not convinced? So, go ask Linus why he built/worked with Linux 0.x ;)

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