TRF House of Software (under construction)

xsat 1.5 - a satellite tracker for the X Window System

xsat is an X-based satellite tracker which draws maps of various world regions and plots satellite ground tracks, complete with timestamps. xsat also produces a list of visible orbit passes for a given city, with extensive information on altitude, azimuth, and time. It can also produce a PostScript file which gives a hard copy of all displayed information.

The current version is 1.5.5; it fixes a problem some users were having with 1.5.3 which would cause the maps not to be drawn.

xsat uses Athena widgets exclusively, along with a Canvas widget of its own, and therefore should easily port to a wide variety of systems.

A sample (from 2009 May 07) set of satellite data is provided; this data is from Dr. T. S. Kelso's CelesTrak web site, and updated element sets are provided there.

xsat 1.5 and later requires new map files which are smaller and in a different format than the previous map files. If you do not already have the xsat version 1.5 map files, you'll need to get them when you get the latest version of xsat. The links below get the latest version of xsat and the latest version of the map files.

xsat was written by David A. Curry, N9MSW; enhancements were made by Terry R. Friedrichsen, N7XJO (xsat@mail.astrotrf.com - please begin the subject line with "xsat"). The new, faster mapping system was inspired by work done by Jukka Neppius.

Get xsat (gzip)
Get xsat (compress)

Get xsat maps (gzip)
Get xsat maps (compress)