PocketSat

I am posting this as a request from some peeps. I built a data file to import Sirius Radio Satellite TLE data into some kick ass software. Before I release the file there is some crediting to do. Oh what is TLE? It's a mathematical expression to define the motion of objects using basically Newtonian physics, inverse square law of gravitational attractions, Cartesian coordinates, Keplerian elements etc. etc. on and on.

BigfatTail Prductions for the PocketSat software that runs on Palm. It's designed to track low earth orbit satellites so when you're on the deck at night and see one, you can whip out the palm and look up up your LEO while sipping that ice cold Fosters. Kudos.

But Sirius Sats move in a highly elliptical orbit that is wayyy out there. The sats are pretty much at 45 degree angles over the USA. 45 east and 45 west. There are three and they rotate in and out of this pattern giving 24 hours of kick ass digital music coverage with about 12 hour overlaps in between sats.

Considering PocketSat is geared to the observer there was no built in orbital information for the sats I went and built one using data from Dr. T.S. Kelso and Celestrak . Inclination and Declination data is maintained there for all vehicles tracked by NORAD/NASA etc.

This data is not formatted to match the import system of the Palm so a little program called tle2pdb was used (once again courtesy of BigFatTail productions) to convert the TLE data to Palm import format.

Then you just import the data into PocketSat. How does this help us listen to Radio? It doesn't!! But it's DAMN cool.

And if anyone's offering a new Palm with the latest PocketSat, I sure wouldn't mind one! It's just to test out Road's cool new feature, honest - then I promise I'll return it asap... :p


It sounds quite interesting, although I would love to have the stuff to actually try it out. ;) Have you considered sending it in to BigfatTail? Maybe they'll send you a copy of the next version for free or something. It's worth a shot...

Quote:

---

I would love to have the stuff to actually try it out.

---

Check out the pic. These showed are the 3 Sirius Satellite Radio birds. Sirus-2 is highlighted so that is the info on the screen and the figure 8 ground track. But if you look all the Sats follow the same track in different time slots. Look how it criss crosses directly over the middle of the USA. Cool stuff. They are wicked high, like I mentioned 45 degree angles. So if you were outside right now you would get blasted by the radio beam from 2 and 1. That's 3 way down over south America and 1 is up in Canada. South American countries have radios because they don't turn off the beam until about 12 degrees relative to our horizon. But it's not legal, they are activated by friends in the US. Like Canada used to be before last Fall. Iceberg is a killer Canadian ONLY artist channel. Anyway here's the pic.

Looks pretty sweet - I'm glad it works. If I ever get a Palm, I'll be sure to try it out! :)

Cheers,

-jk