SGP4/SDP4 Progress

I have done good progress in the devlopment of the new tracking code. Actually, I have decided to use T. S. Kelso’s tracking routines from celestrak, which have been converted from fortan77 to C by Neoklis Kyriazis.

Neoklis has done a very impressive work in the area of linux programs for ham radio. Unfortunetely, his web page has suddenly disappeared (see this page) and the only traces of his work is the tracking routines in ktrack and predict.

What I have done so far with this code is:

  • Integrate it into gpredict.
  • Optimise a lot for multiple satellite tracking.
  • Test the integrated code using test data from the celestrak document.

All the test have passed fine, in fact, all results were within 0.0005%, most of them musch better.