[amsat-bb] Re: Need help with sat tracking software

[Anthony Monteiro <aa2tx@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 02:50 PM 9/30/2007, Alan P. Biddle wrote:
>... My own solution is to spend a
>few bucks and get a copy of Instantrack from AMSAT.  It is a bulletproof
>program, easy to configure, and easy to check whether you are using the keps
>you think you are.  It doesn't work well in real time mode within Windows
>because of RT clock issues, but it works fine for pass prediction, and
>allows you to break the tie between the other two programs.

Dear friends,

Just a note. I am also a big fan of InstantTrack and have tested it under
most versions of Windows including XP but not Vista. It actually does work
well in real-time tracking modes under Windows as long as you run it in
Full-Screen mode.

This is due to the way that the MS DOS emulator for Windows was designed.
It does not implement the real-time clock tick interrupt correctly
and loses lots of ticks except when it is in full-screen mode. This has
been true of every version of Windows back to 3.0 probably because the
old cpus couldn't keep up and the guys in Redmond never re-wrote it
for the newer cpus that could easily handle it.

As long as you use full-screen mode, you can also run radio tuning
and rotor tracking in real-time and even quit InstantTrack to
run a DOS program in the foreground with tuning and tracking still
running in the background.

There are other DOS environments for Windows including open-source versions
such as DOSBox so an ambitious programmer could fix this problem...


73,
Tony AA2TX





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