NADER’s Satellite Blog: FodTrack

The world’s best beloved real time satellite tracking system!
It was in 1992, and I was looking for new horizons in my amateur
radio station. I had done it all, or almost so. Satellites were the single
major frontier I had not yet explored. So I started setting up my satellite
station, starting small and improving it step by step. In 1994 I reached
the point where I needed directional antennas and a computer control system
to keep them pointed at the satellites. There were several systems on the
market for just that purpose, but they were all expensive, and most didn’t
perform very well. So I decided to roll my own. I designed a simple interface
to connect the antenna rotator to the computer, and wrote a program that
calculated the position of any desired satellite and sent the azimuth and
elevation data to the interface. So far, so good. My problem was solved.

Soon later a colleague asked me for a copy of that program. Since it
was still very rustic, I added a basic user interface to it, and released
it as version 1.0 into the public domain. The rest, as they say, is history…
Many people started using FodTrack, made suggestions for improvement, reported
bugs, and I kept releasing one version after another, over 30  versions
so far! Most of this development happened in the first five years; after
that, the system stabilized, and since then I only occasionally add some
new features.At this time, FodTrack controls both the antenna aiming, and the radio
equipment, and can be run in manual or in automatic mode. It has a GPS
interface for time and position setting, so that it can be used in mobile
satellite stations. It is highly configurable to the requirements of each
station. And what is its best liked feature, it’s completely free for amateur
and other non-commercial use! Only if someone uses it for profit, I would
like a modest share of the money made that way!

FodTrack started as a DOS program, designed with a view towards optimal
performance in DESQview, which was the best multitasking environment available
when the program was first created. It also worked well in old Windows versions,
as long as you configured a DOS window with direct hardware access, which
is needed in order to write the special output required by the rotator
interface. I used it under Windows 98 and even XP on an old main-board. Some people even used it on Linux (with DOSEMU).
More recently FodTrack was changed into a genuine Windows program,
by using a Windows-based compiler
and making changes necessary for this brave new USB world that has no
parallel ports and often not even real COM ports. Unfortunately this
meant dropping support for the original parallel-port-based FodTrack
rotator interface. The look and operation of the software has been kept
unchanged.
On this link you will find both the last DOS-based version of
FodTrack that supports the original interface, and the current Windows
version. homo ludens homepage.
de Manfred- XQ2FOD ..