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This page has a lot for beginners but those with more advanced knowledge of satellite tracking should be able to find something of use here.

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So, you want to track satellites?

Maybe you want to track the MIR space station, or the shuttle, or a weather sat, or a GPS sat, or whatever. Well, you've come to the right place...

The first thing you need is a satellite tracking program. I'd recommend Winorbit or SatScape. These are FREE programs of high quality for Windows 3.1 or Windows 95/Windows 98. I like these programs because they basically do everything!

But there are also many other satellite tracking programs available. One is Traksat/Wintrak, which comes in either a DOS and Windows version. Another good one is PC-Trak, though the programmer is nowhere to be found!  You can find this and others at AMSAT files page, and check out the links below too.

Here are some other sites for tracking software:

If you have an older or limited computer you can find some trackers at one of the sites above that will work on pretty much anything, including palmtops.

Make sure that you properly set the program up for your timezone and location. Some allow you to pick a nearby city or a latitude and longitude (or both).

Setting up your local time is very important. Find out what timezone you are in a nd how many hours offset you are from UTC (Zulu or Greenwich) time. Make sure that you take into account Daylight Savings Time, too. You may be offset from UTC by -5 hours but when it comes time to change your clocks under Daylight Savings Time you may then be -4 hours.

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Elements

Next you'll have to make sure that your satellite elements are correct.

The elements are a sequence of seven numbers used to show the position of an object in space. Keplerian elements usually look something like this (this example is for the MIR space station and is out of date):

Mir
1 16609U 86017A 97135.62223629 .00002738 00000-0 36798-4 0 9088
2 16609 051.6569 249.4567 0010080 012.6082 347.5324 15.59388494641949

Most satellites will be in an elliptical orbit. Below you will see an orbit of the Mir space station in black as shown with Winorbit:

elliptical orbit

Satellites can also be in geostationary orbit, which means that they are orbiting at the same speed at which the Earth is spinning, allowing them to stay in one place relative to a point on Earth.

Here are descriptions of some of the parameters required:
 

Some satellites, like MIR, are in low orbit, and due to atmospheric drag their orbits change frequently. They may also occasionally fire maneuvering rockets for orbital corrections, which also changes their orbits.

So you have to make sure that you frequently update the elements.
 

Winorbit allows you to download an element file into a particular sub-directory, where the program will automatically update the elements file with your newest parameters.
With other programs you may have to do this manually. Usually this only involves replacing a file (Traksat defaults to TLE.TXT) or importing the data directly from inside the program.

To get the newest elements here are some sites:

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Checking Your Setup/Online Tracking Programs

After you think you have everything set up correctly I recommend checking it, to make sure.

Try out one of the sites below to make sure that your software is set up right.

Also, if you don't want to go through the trouble of downloading the software, setting it up, and updating the elements periodically - you can just use these sites. These sites track sats right on your browser, some of them graphically. They won't show all satellites but they will show MIR and maybe some of the more common ones.
 

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Visual Tracking

Now, if you're going to do some visual sighting - well, good luck! Conditions have to be fairly favorable.

The best time is dawn or dusk - because the earth is in shadow, the sky is fairly dark, but since the satellite is much higher then you it may still be in the sunlight. And the best viewing is when the sun is at your back and you are looking in the direction of the satellite, like when the sat is in the east at evening time and in the west in the morning.

Size and orientation of a satellite also makes a difference to viewing from the ground. Some may be in a bad angle from night and a better angle the next. Some also rotate, making them sparkle.

If you are watching for MIR and see two spacecraft - one may be an unmanned Progress-M cargo freighter or a Soyuz-TM spacecraft carrying cosmonauts.

Other more visible sats are Glonass, GPS, DMSP, SeaSat1, Spot, FenYung, Landsats, NOAA's, Meteor, Alouettte, etc.

Or it may be the space shuttle preparing to dock. The International Space Station has begun to be assembled and when it is finished (or even partly finished) it should present some good visual sightings.

You may be able to sight a sat, like one of the aforementioned, with your naked eye, but having a pair of binoculars (7x35's are good - wider field of vision is better then lesser) and/or a telescope might help too. Make sure that both your watch and your computer's clock are accurate - the latter so that your satellite tracking software is also correct.  You can download lots of great programs for setting your computer's clock via the Internet.

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picture of satellite

Receiving Satellite Transmissions

Equipment

Depending on the satellites that you want to listen to, your receiving equipment may need to cover the 135-145 Mhz, the 435-437 Mhz, and/or around the 1.2 Ghz ranges. You may want to consider additional equipment like decoders and digital modems and such.

There are various kinds of antennas which you can use and picking one depends on what you want to listen to, where you want to listen, how much money you want to put into it, how much time, how technical-oriented you are, etc.

Yagi's are fairly common and must be aimed, either by hand or with a rotor. You can even have the rotor computer-controlled with various interfaces, cards, and software (some of the latter you can find above).

But omnidirectional antennas work too, depending on what you're trying to receive.

Using a pre-amp can help pick out those weak signals. Make sure that you attach it as near to the antenna as possible, otherwise you'll be amplifying a lot of noise along with the signal.
 
 

Software

Here is the best and largest collection of  decoding software for sound cards.  You'll find stuff for CW, weather fax, RTTY, etc..  Amateur Radio Soundblaster Software Collection.

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Types of Signals

There are a number of different types of signals which a satellite may transmit.

There may be voice, CW (Morse Code), RTTY (Radio Teletype), SSTV (Slow Scan TV), and telemetry (usually as packet data, though some may be ASCII, CW, or RTTY - usually all sats transmit some sort of telemetry). You'll need some kind of decoders for the latter kinds of signals.

Here is the best and largest collection of  decoding software for sound cards.  You'll find stuff for CW, weather fax, etc..  Amateur Radio Soundblaster Software Collection.

Space Picture

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What I Use

At home on my desktop computer I use Winorbit for software. As I said above, Winorbit is a great program, and best of all its free!

About fifty feet above my computer and on an Army-surplus mast is a Radio Shack all-band base antenna with some heavy-duty coax (because of the signal loss inherent in long runs of coaxial cable it's very important important to use good quality coax if your antennas very far away from your receiver).

For receiving equipment I use a number of scanners and a shortwave receiver.


On the road I have an old Panasonic laptop with various satellite tracking programs.  And remember, if your laptop or desktop can't run some of the newer programs you can sometimes find older, less resource-hungry versions out there.

Usually I use my Uniden BC-200 XLT or Radio Shack Pro-35 scanners for reception.

The antenna is a mobile magnet mount all-band scanner antenna from Radio Shack (cat no. 20-012, $29).

The adverse weather conditions in my home area corroded the magnet so that I had to convert it to a trunk-lid mount. I used an old CB trunk-lid mount, and with a minimum of trouble got the antenna's base mated to the CB mount. A little light sanding of the screws on the bottom of the mount and on the places under the trunk-lid where the screws would contact were the only other things that I did.

Immediately I began getting much better reception across the radio spectrum then when it was a magnet mount, probably due to both the cleaning of the electrical contacts and the better ground connection to the car. A few days later I started receiving the MIR space station radio transmissions, including some russian background music they were playing up there!

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So you see that you really don't need much in the way of equipment.

And remember, if you're into amateur radio you may be able to make contacts with the amateur people on the space station or shuttle.

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An example

To give you an example - I pick up weather satellite transmissions with my handheld scanners (Uniden BC-200 XLT or Radio Shack Pro-35) and a rubber ducky antenna! A couple example freqs are 137.400 (Sich Okean Sats), 137.850 (Meteor Sat), 137.620 (NOAA Sat), 137.500 (more NOAA sat).

Get the program WeFax 2.3 and you'll be able to use your computer, soundcard, and mic to decode weather fax transmissions for weather map pictures. This program also has an example WAV file so you can hear what the transmissions sound like. If you get one of the tracking programs above you'll have a better chance of finding when the sat is going to be in range.

If you would like some more help on how to track satellites check out this page - ON1CAU SATELLITE PAGE.
 
 

Picture of Milky Way

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Satellite/Space/Tracking-related Websites

Picture of Earth

Allen's Weather Satellite Page

George's Telescope making, Satellite tracking and Astronomy site

Amateur Radio Soundblaster Software Collection

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Mir Pages

Picture of MIR
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Shuttle Pages

Picture of Shuttle
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