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.