Notices

Starting in another thread there was a discussion of how to get the best satellite tracking for the N900 and other maemo handhelds. Most other solutions involve Palm emulation or installing Debian.
This application is primarily of interest to amateur radio communication satellite users and satellite spotters. Most users are carrying portable gear or backpacking so a handheld form factor tracker is ideal.
http://www.qsl.net/n1vtn/petittrack.html
The N1VTN site has source and Zaurus binaries for Petittrack which is one of the best tracking and overpass predictor programs made and it is designed from the start for handhelds.
If anyone has Qtopia working with their scratchbox maybe give this a spin and see if it compiles easily, the Zaurus .ipk version was a mature stable app which can hopefully provide a native tracking and prediction utility. http://www.qsl.net/n1vtn/petittrack_1.2.0.tar.gz


Previous thread http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=9672&page=2

Sadly, no one seems to care about this great application.

If there was a qt developer that would look at the sources of petittrack to convert it from qte to qt4 i think that it would be an easy porting since the application counts only ~1700 lines of qte code...

On the other hand, port this application to maemo would fill the great "missing" of a satellite tracking for maemo and would revive this app written for the first linux PDA.
Attached you can find a screenshot of petitrack.

In the meanwhile, i have built gpredict 1.1 and predict for maemo, but probably they are far from be easy to use in this little screen...
Here the binaries:
http://ge.tt/7mbX97r

Wow, a N900 combined with a SDR, for tx/rx a hacked $40 USB controlled radio can be added or substituted for the SDR and a hand made yaggi to grab the weak signal like this
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=91182
and/or
http://www.elazary.com/index.php?opt...uv5r&Itemid=17
and
http://ve2zaz.net/Arrow_Ant/Arrow_Style_Ant.htm
and the doppler frequency shift is computed and adjusted by gpredict!
An ultra portable way to get a shot at talking to the astronauts during ham radio time on the space station or even just using the free amateur radio com-sats

hey... the satellite A-040 of the images lost his functionality 6 months after these screenshots due to a battery failure.... goodnight A-040!

AO-40 is probably one of the greatest ham-sats ever. It could use 2.4ghz up and 1.2ghz down for a really compact antenna though I think the best economy/cheap-availability mode was 440mhz up and 1.2ghz down using a sat-TV LNB. It was in a molinya orbit withc simulated geostationary for a few hours, you could stick your antenna on a tripod and move it as required. Sadly the engine exploded and this failure weakened the battery.

I hope there is someone who can do the conversion, Petittrack is ideal for actual satellite communication on a handheld device as it also shows a sun and moon as sky landmarks to help aim your antenna. I used to attach both my true dual band VHF/UHF Alinco DJ-580T and my Zaurus SL-5500 on the yaggi antenna mast to help me aim and track, Petittrack also helped me tune the relativistic Doppler radio frequency shift coming and going.
Here is a list of sats you can play with and their reported status
http://oscar.dcarr.org/
all you need is the N900 Software Defined Radio
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=91182 , a USB host adapter, a hand made ground wire yaggi http://ve2zaz.net/Arrow_Ant/Arrow_Style_Ant.htm and a rtl-sdr DVB-T usb sticks based on the RTL2832 chip which go for about $20.