gpredict

Nice review of Gpredict

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I stumbled upon this nice review of Gpredict Jack Wallen at ghacks.net : Track satellites with Gpredict. It’s always good to hear what other people think about it and I was particularly happy to read that Gpredict is an incredibly simple to use tool that will allow anyone to track multiple satellites quickly and easily. … Read more

Satellite Tooltips

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Satllite tooltip in GpredictYou may have already seen tooltips in the Gpredict user interface. I have made extensive use of them for providing short description of the functionality of the GUI controls all over the application. Lately, I have felt a desire to extend the usage of tooltips to also include graphical objects like satellites shown on the map or the passes shown in the “Sky at a glance” module.

Gpredict uses GooCanvas for graphics, which adds a the “missing” 2D canvas library to Gtk+. Since version 0.15 GooCanvas includes support for Gtk+-like tooltips for any objects on the canvas. This is really great since it simplifies the effort from messing with own popup windows to using single line API calls.

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Coming up in Gpredict 1.2

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After fixing several major and minor bugs in Gpredict 1.1 it was time to look at what new cool features version 1.2 should include. Fortunately, there is a nice list of feature requests from users that have been accumulated over time so all I had to do was to pick one and start working on … Read more

Gpredict 1.0 beta 2 released

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Finally, the Gpredict 1.0 beta 2 release has come together, featuring a completely rewritten radio controller / Doppler tuning algorithm. It became a bit more complicated than I originally anticipated, because the incoming requests for improvement of the original controller did not limit themselves to controlling the downlink and the uplink, but also called for using two different radios.

Given that there are very few full-duplex radios out there designed for satellite communications and that they are very expensive, I found this request to be very reasonable and decided to implement it. The resulting controller should be able to work using receivers, transmitters, half-duplex transceivers, and combination of those. Full-duplex has not been implemented, because I am not sure whether hamlib is able to do that properly. That will be implemented in one of the upcoming betas.

The new radio controller
The new radio control UI. See more screenshots.

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Gpredict Updates

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I just realized that the last time I have blogged about my pet project, Gpredict, was back in February 2007. Back then, the big news was the Sky at a Glance function and there has in fact been a lot of evolution since then despite the big silence in the Gpredict Developer Blog. Let me try to sum up the progress from last two years as well as what you can expect to happen in the weeks to come.

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Tke Sky at a Glance

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Although gpredict has some very good satellite pass prediction functions, I have been missing a sky at a glance feature that can quickly show when the satellites will be up during the next X hours. After a few weeks of casual hacking, this feature is now ready for testing.

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