[Dxspider-support] Keps not converting

[Dirk Koopman]

Bela Markus wrote:
> Hi Jim,
> 
> this is bit late answer, but I had to start dealing with sat tracking 
> with Spider just now,
> 
> While NORAD and NASA orbital date both 2-line formats, they are 
> different, Spider need the NASA format. This is, why NORAD data is not 
> processed.
> 
> Dirk:
> 
> If you read this, is it possible to add the import of the NORAD format? 
> Looking around I found the NORAD orbital elements available widely and 
> for more sats than in NASA format.
> 
> Or a NORAD to NASA converter would be appreciated too.
> 
> Regards... Béla, HA5DI
> 
> Jim Reisert AD1C írta:
>> I used to run this script, but haven't in a while.  I probably have 
>> not run it
>> since putting DX Spider on the bigger box last fall.
>>
>> Did I do something wrong?
>>
>>
>> D:\Cygwin\bin\wget.exe -qN 
>> http://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/amateur.txt -P
>> D:\spider\local
>>

Basically: convkeps.pl has a state machine in it to skip over the
non-keps stuff at the beginning of the keps email message. However, the
-p flag is supposed to fix that.

However, it doesn't and, poking around, that is because of the [-]
characters at the end of the line (anybody point me at the meaning of
the characters between the [ and the ]?). This is now fixed, but not yet
in CVS.

There is also an issue with naming, in that AMSAT use AO-07 and Norad
use AO-7. We probably need to standardise. So which one should we
standardise on and are there any other differences? If I can get a
comprehensive list, I will stick a lookup table in the code and make the
conversion automatic.

Dirk