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site designation by lat/long

Grover – July 25, 2008 – 16:58

When I try to get your website to generate predictions for the ISS, it never accepts the name of the city which I enter. Is there a way to get your tracking program to accept my lat/long coordinates instead of a city name? Please advise.

Grover Hughes email:

Observing ISS
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Re: site designation by lat/long

pd0rkc – July 25, 2008 – 20:52

Hello Grover,

Beter you use sat trackings software, because the tracker
here in IFC does not always give the right position.
It requeres a few minutes to configure and you can
follow the ISS without internet.
Good freeware trackings software:
Satscape:
http://www.satscape.co.uk/iweb/Satscape/Front_page.html

Orbitron:
http://www.stoff.pl/

After configuring the software, do not forget
to download once in a week new orbit calculations (keppler data).

73's Cor PD0RKC
Ham Radio In Space: http://iss.ontwikkel.nl

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Thanks for your response.

Grover – July 28, 2008 – 17:15

Thanks for your response. The reason I was asking was because a friend told me that the predictions which I generate and send to him weekly are within a few seconds of matching observations, whereas the predictions he got from your site (or so I understood) wre several MINUTES in error. I merely wanted to compare your values with my own.
I am a retired professional engineer/scientist from Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I wrote computer programs for tracking various satellites in which Sandia had an interest. Some problems required precisions of 5 arc-seconds or less in position, which required some doing!

I might suggest that the element sets are better known as "elsets" for short, rather than "kepplers", especially as "Kepler" has only one "p". Of course, different folks have their own jargon, I understand that.

Best regards, and thanks again for your response.

Grover Hughes

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Re:Thanks for your response.

pd0rkc – July 30, 2008 – 15:03

Hello Hughes,

ISSFANCLUB is (technically) owned by Alain (IZ6BYY).
Alain is outside his country and very busy with his work.
If I doubt on my trackings software, I always compare
it with the ISS position on this website:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/tracking/

73's Cor PD0RKC

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