Three things reported together from the tab.
The shipped frequency plan went from eleven satellites to twenty-five:
the eight Tevel FM cubesats, EO-88, AO-109, CAS-4A and 4B, TO-108,
GreenCube's single-frequency digipeater, and QO-100's wideband
transponder beside its narrowband one. It remains a starting point in a
file the operator can correct — a transponder gets switched and no
release should be needed to follow it — and the picker still lists every
bird in the element set when the "with a plan" filter is unticked.
The readout column drags to any width between 240 and 720 pixels,
double-clicks back to its default, and folds away entirely. How much map
against how much detail is the operator's call: watching a footprint
cross an ocean and working a pass want opposite things.
And the locator is no longer asked for twice. Passes are predicted from
the station locator, which is set once in Station information; the field
here was only ever for an antenna at another site, so it says so and sits
folded away. Nobody should have to wonder which of two locators is in
use.
Also: "Driven by" is two columns wide. "OpsLog (EasyComm II)" did not fit
in a third of the row, and a truncated choice is a choice that cannot be
read.
Two things the tracker cannot work without, both kept apart from the
orbital maths on purpose.
The elements come from Celestrak's amateur group, with PE0SAT as the
fallback for the hour when Celestrak is rate-limiting a hundred trackers
at once. A malformed satellite is skipped rather than fatal — a feed of
two hundred birds with one bad checksum must still give the operator the
other hundred and ninety-nine — and the count is returned so the app can
say so. The cache is plain TLE text in the data directory, written
beside and renamed, and only replaced once a feed has produced usable
elements: a captive portal must not take away the set the station
already had. Loading it first is what makes the satellite tab full on a
shack PC with no internet.
The frequency plan is separate because it changes for different reasons:
elements every few days from a feed, a transponder when the satellite is
commanded into another mode. The shipped list is a starting point, copied
to the data directory on first use and read from there afterwards, so an
operator can correct a frequency without waiting for a release and keep
the correction across updates — and a file they have broken is reported,
not overwritten.
UplinkFor is the part that matters on the air. On an inverting linear
transponder, tuning up the downlink means going down the uplink; get it
backwards and you transmit at the far end of the passband from the
station you can hear, which is the classic first evening on a linear
bird.
Names are matched on letters and digits alone. Celestrak says
"RADFXSAT (FOX-1B)" where every operator says AO-91, and nobody spells
Es'hail the same way twice.
rouggy