25 satellites, typed by hand and never revisited. Eight of them were the
first-generation Tevel constellation, which re-entered in 2024; four more had
come down too; and the nine Tevel-2 satellites that replaced them, the Chinese
space station, AO-27, AO-123 and twenty others were simply absent. So: 44
satellites now, and a generator instead of a memory.
cmd/satgen joins three public sources on the NORAD catalog number — Celestrak's
amateur group and PE0SAT's mirror for which birds OpsLog can actually get
elements for, and SatNOGS DB for the transmitters. It is a one-shot tool, run by
hand, the same arrangement as cmd/cntygen, and it is deliberately conservative:
- It never destroys a curated entry. The hand-written plans hold things
SatNOGS does not reliably carry — a CTCSS tone, the QO-100 passband as
operators describe it — so an existing bird keeps its data and only gains
its catalog number.
- It prunes on the re-entry date, which is a fact SatNOGS publishes rather
than a judgement about which of the missing satellites are missing for good.
- It refuses a digital uplink that does not say what it is. A GMSK uplink is a
command channel far more often than a digipeater, and shipping the wrong one
invites somebody to transmit on a control frequency. An analog uplink with
both ends is a contact by construction, which is what catches the repeaters
that describe themselves only as "Mode V/U FM".
- Its output is deterministic. One satellite can hold two catalog entries —
GreenCube is 53106 in one feed and 53109 in the other — and iterating a map
picked a different one each run.
A bird now carries its NORAD number, and that is how its elements are found.
Names were the only join before, and they are written differently by every party
involved: "TIANYAN 01" and "TO-108" are one satellite that had never once met,
so TO-108 tracked nothing at all.
And the plan now reaches a station that has already run OpsLog. The editable
copy was written on the first launch and was the operator's list for ever after,
so a release adding nine satellites reached nobody who had opened the tab. It is
merged on each load instead: a satellite they already have is untouched, edits
and corrections included, and only the ones they have never seen are added.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
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.
rouggyandClaude Opus 5