In order to help you make an informed decision about which satellite tracking program best satisfies your needs, the following information is provided for the Unix OS. Unfortunately, because I do not have access to a Unix platform to evaluate the software personally and no WWW sites can be found for many of these packages, the information provided is somewhat limited.
If you are aware of any other Unix satellite tracking programs or can provide additional information on those listed below, please let me know.
PREDICT is a multi-user satellite tracking and orbital prediction program written under the Linux operating system by John A. Magliacane, KD2BD. Further information is available at:
This program has gradually evolved over many years. Its purpose has always been to support visual observations of satellites. For that reason, the normal execution of the program produces a single prediction for each satellite. That prediction point is the culmination point if that point is outside the Earth's shadow. Otherwise, a point outside the Earth's shadow that is nearest the culmination point is chosen. Multiple predictions for each satellite may also be chosen. The prediction of an object's magnitude is a primary goal. The probable error in time of prediction is computed by a heuristic. The observer's comments may be added to the "intrinsic magnitudes" file for an object so that they will be printed with subsequent predictions. There is a "radio" predictions flag that will bypass all of the parts of the program having to do with magnitudes, the Earth's shadow, RA and Dec.
This program is freeware. There are no restrictions on its distribution.
The program is written in FORTRAN.
The program has certain "built-in" limits: 1) No more than 4000 names and sizes may be read from the "intrinsic magnitudes" file. 2) No more than 9000 element sets may be stored from the orbital elements files. This Linux version was produced under Slackware. Quicksat is now available for Red Hat Linux.
The author of the program is Mike McCants. He can be reached at mmccants@ev1.net.
SatTrack is a very mature Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) satellite orbit analysis software package for UNIX platforms and competes very favorably with other high-end orbit analysis products.
XSAT is an X-based satellite tracker which draws maps of various world regions and plots satellite ground tracks, complete with timestamps. XSAT also produces a list of visible orbit passes for a given city, with extensive information on azimuth, and time. It can also produce a PostScript file which gives a hard copy of all displayed information.
XSAT uses Athena widgets exclusively, along with a Canvas widget of its own, and therefore should easily port to a wide variety of systems. A patch file is included which modifies XSAT version 1.2 for Solaris 2.3 systems.
A recent (1996 February 28) set of satellite data is provided, along with a C shell script which retrieves updated element sets from NORAD via anonymous FTP.
XSAT was written by David A. Curry, N9MSW (davy@ecn.purdue.edu); enhancements were made by Terry R. Friedrichsen, N7XJO (terry@venus.sunquest.com). Solaris 2.3 patches by Mike Porter (mike@strauss.udel.edu).
Other sources of Unix satellite tracking software:
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TLE Data | Space Data |  |
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| Current Archives Documentation |
GPS EOP Space Weather | ||
| SATCAT | Columns | ||
| Boxscore | Software | ||
| SOCRATES | |||
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Dr. T.S. Kelso [TS.Kelso@celestrak.com] Last updated: 2006 January 31 15:03:32 UTC Accessed 18,840 times since 2000 December 16 Current system time: 2008 July 4 15:13:20 UTC |