OpenSATS - Beta

If you're looking for something to do point your browser here to our new OpenSATS website. At the moment you have the ability to track Amateur Radio satellites, the moon, sun and ISS via Google Maps. Be sure to login to your OpenAPRS account on OpenSATS and check out View..Set Location... to set your home location for Azimuth and Elevation are displayed. Click a satellite to see it's ground cover, bearing, elevation and 2 hour flight path. As seen in the topic this is a Beta (probably more like alpha) stage project so while it's functional I have a lot to do (including fixing the somewhat incorrect elevations). I'd love to hear your comments, drop me a line...

Small Outage

Earlier this morning we suffered a small outage on one of our load balancing servers. Everything should be back to normal now. I also reconfigured our satellite Keplerian file updater to run automatically so the satellite views should be up to date from now on.

Station Path Colors

I recently did an event where I had several trackers out in a park area for hours on end. As you can imagine the tracks were long and since the people with the trackers were on foot the track lines got pretty difficult to tell the begining, ending and direction each person took. As a result, I've changed the code to start color coding station track lines by sequence. Basically the track will be split up in order by about 6 different colors: (end) red, yellow, green, blue and black (start).

After making this change it seemed a lot easier to determine where an individual went, hopefully this change will benefit you all in the same way. For short paths, not all colors will be displayed.

More on Digipath Lines

You may notice now when you track a single station that other stations in the area or a little further away will also be displayed. These "other" stations are all of the digipeaters the single tracked station has been heard by in the timeframe you've set for the track. Typically when a station is moving you can hover your mouse over one of their directional icons in their track and digipath lines will be displayed for that particular packet that was sent and show the digipeaters involved in getting that packet to APRS-IS.

There was a bug reported about digipath lines intersecting objects a digipeater has created rather than the actual digipeater that the packet report used to get to APRS-IS, this has been resolved. Thanks go for N7FMH for reporting this error.