Copyright 1992 by David A. Curry Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. The author makes no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ April, 1992 This is Version 1.0 of N9MSW XSAT, an X Window System based satellite tracking program. XSAT provides the following features: - On-screen or PostScript display of maps of each continent, the United States, or the world. - On-screen or PostScript display of "ground track" information placed over the maps, showing the path of the satellite. - On-screen or PostScript display of satellite visibility and location centered on a particular city. - Interactive selection of the city from which to compute satellite visibility information. - Interactive selection of the satellite to be tracked. - Interactive adjustment of simulation parameters such as start and stop times, step time, and minimum satellite elevation. The orbital calculations are done using the code written by Robert Berger (N3EMO), and posted to comp.sources some time ago as "n3emo-orbit". XSAT 1.0 has been compiled and tested on a Sun SPARCstation 1 running SunOS 4.1.1 and MIT X11R5. It hasn't been tested on anything else, but if changes need to be made on other systems, they should be minor. Please send any patches in "diff -c" output to the author at the address given below. To install XSAT, do the following: 1. Edit the Imakefile and set the value of XSATLIBDIR to be the path of the directory in which to store XSAT's data files. The data files require about 4MB of disk space. 2. Edit the "xsat.h" file and change any of the defaults you don't like. The defaults are fairly reasonable, and can be changed as X11 resources, so you probably won't need to change anything. 3. Build the Makefile and build the program: % xmkmf % make 4. Install the program and data files: % make install 5. Install the manual page: % make install.man Notes on some of the data files: lib/cities.info This file contains the names of cities the program knows about, and their latitude, longitude, and elevation. There are about 350 cities listed, but elevations are listed only for the cities in the United States. I do not have a source for elevation information for international cities. The latitude/longitude information for the non-US cities is also not as accurate as it could be; it came from the UUCP map database. Make sure your city is listed in this file; if not, you will have to select a nearby city. If you have elevation information for any of the cities listed, or better latitude/longitude information, or new cities not in the file, please send them to me and I will add them. Please tell me your source for the information when you send it. lib/map.* These are files of line segments (x1,y1) (x2,y2) for drawing the maps. The files in the XSAT distribution are a massaged and combined version of the ones distributed by James Peterson of MCC. The original source for the data is the CIA World Data Bank, circa late 1980's. lib/sattelites.doc A description of the NORAD two-line orbital element set format used by XSAT. lib/satellites.info The NORAD two-line element sets for just about all the satellites up there. This file is posted to the net in sci.space (or sci.space.news) every week or so; it is also available via anonymous FTP from the host blackbird.afit.af.mil in the directory pub/space, or can be obtained from the Celestial BBS, (513) 427-0674. If you have comments, questions, or modifications for XSAT, please direct them to the author. Enjoy. David A. Curry, N9MSW Purdue University Engineering Computer Network 1285 Electrical Engineering Building West Lafayette, IN 47907 davy@ecn.purdue.edu