[Groundstation-user] Gpredict 0.6.0 Released

[Alexandru C. <al...@ph...>]

Greetings, 
 
I am happy to announce that after more than one year of development the
new version of Gpredict is now available.

Gpredict is a real-time satellite tracking and orbit prediction
program. It can calculate the position and other data for an unlimited
number of satellite and show the data using maps, tables, and other
views. Gpredict can also make detailed predictions of future satellite
passes relative to one or more ground stations.

The most significant changes in this release is the new module design
allowing to combine different views (map/table/etc) into one layout.
Moreover, gpredict now only depends on the Gtk+ 2 libraries making it
easier to build on different systems. A complete list of changes
follows below:

- New module design: A module is no longer either a list or a map.
  A module can contain up to three views that can be any combination
  of map, list, polar and single satellite view. 
- Each module can be configured individually (colours, views, location)
  or it can use the global default settings.
- Module have three states: Docked, Window and fullscreen. 
- Improved map view quality and performance with possibility to
  highlight areas covered by satellites. 
- List View is fully configurable with respect to which columns should
  be visible. Furthermore, the list view has a lots of new columns. 
- The upcoming passes dialogs can show much more details like TCA,
  duration and maximum elevation. 
- Context sensitive pop-up menus instead of buttons to access the most
  important functions. 
- Geographical coordinates can be shown using N, S, E and W suffixes
  instead of sign. This should settle the debate on whether negative
  longitude is East or West of Greenwich (I know which one is the
  correct one ;-). 
- Added support for imperial units (default is still the metric
  system). 
- Added support for user specified time format strings. 
- No upper limit on the number of satellites. 
- Uses SGP4/SDP4 algorithms for element set propagation. 
- Requires Gtk+ 2.8 or later and GNOME dependencies are gone for good! 
- Gpredict is now much more robust against configuration errors. If
  something goes wrong you can simply delete all user configuration
  files and start from fresh. Besides that, gpredict only uses human
  readable configuration files, which can be edited using a text editor.
  It should, however, never be necessary to alter the configuration
  files manually. 
- Draft User Manual and Design Document. 
 
You can dowload this release from the SourceForge download page: 
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=25530&package_id=20460&release_id=444772 
 
You can also take a look at the screen shots on the updated web site: 
http://groundstation.sourceforge.net/gpredict/ 


I hope you will enjoy! 
 
Alex 
OZ9AEC