[Dxspider-support] Re: Auto updating Keplerian elements

[Dirk Koopman]

On Wed, 2005-08-10 at 16:34 -0700, Jim Reisert AD1C wrote:
> I finally got around to Jesus' mail.
> 
> I ran the wget and convkeps.pl commands manually, I have a new keps.pm file.
> 
> I did the load/keps command.
> 
> sh/ssat still shows all very OLD elements (older than 1000 days).

Yes. This is a feature.

Let me try to explain:-

On start up the contents of the Keps.pm are read (from /spider/local, if
present, or from /spider/perl if not).

When you do a convkeps.pl it *updates* the contents of the Keps.pm
in /spider/local (if necessary using the /spider/perl as a base).
Therefore 'old' keps are retained.

The reason for this is that you can shove many different sets of keps
into the system. Not just the Amsat ones. Some people do this. 

The original set of keps had (it turns out) some fairly esoteric
satellites (because I didn't know any different) as well as things like
MIR (which is sadly no more).

If you want to clean your keps down, try: 

  convkeps.pl -c <input filename>

load/keps (IIRC) should then also clear down from scratch. 

However, I have an action as well: which is to reduce the number of
satellites to the basic minimum, in the distribution, probably as sent
out by the ARRL so that people don't have this much of a problem.

Can I also remind people that I send out the latest keps from AMSAT as a
message (twice, I have just noticed) once a week and you can do a
load/keps directly from the message, ie:

  load/keps 54234

This does the normal convkeps.pl and load/keps in one step.

Dirk G1TLH