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DIY Satellite Tracking
Travis Goodspeed has authored a blog post detailing his method of tracking low-earth-orbit satellites. Starting with an old Felcom 82B dish made for use on maritime vessels, he added motors to move it around and a webcam-based homemade calibration system.
"For handling the radio input and controlling the motors, I have a BeagleBone wired into a USB hub. These are all mounted on the trunk of the assembly inside of the radome, sending data back to a server indoors. ... In order to operate the dish, I wanted both a flashy GUI and concise scripting, but scripting was the higher priority. Toward that end, I constructed the software as a series of daemons that communicate through a PostgreSQL database on a server inside the house. For example, I can run SELECT * FROM sats WHERE el>0 to select the names and positions of all currently tracked satellites that are above the horizon. To begin tracking the International Space Station if it is in view, I run UPDATE target SET name='ISS';. For predicting satellite locations, I wrote a quick daemon using PyEphem that fetches satellite catalog data from CelesTrak. These positions are held in a database, with duplicates filtered out and positions constantly updated. PyEphem is sophisticated enough to predict in any number of formats, so it's easy to track many of the brighter stars as well as planets and deep-space probes, such as Voyagers 1 and 2."
I have a better question....why? Why would you go to this much trouble when you can use the free Stellarium and know where pretty much everything visible (and not visible unless you have a big ass telescope) and just call it a day? It can even control a telescope for you, just slap it on a netbook, wire it to the telescope and there ya go, easy peasy.
Who knows, maybe the guy didn't have anything better to do with his time but for everybody else you can do the same thing by just installing Stellarium and the extra chart packs. Hell if something you want to track isn't in any of their charts just tell 'em on the forums and i bet it'll be whipped off in no time at all, they just love adding more objects to the packs.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yes, but computer controlled az/el rotors to track satellites is not new, at least not to ham radio. Just one of many examples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXWF09gPUSs