[amsat-bb] ANNOUNCE: aprstlm 1.4 Available With Support For Castor And Pollux

[Iain Young, G7III]

Hi All,

aprstlm (A unix/linux ncurses APRS [& now AX.25] telemetry viewer)
version 1.4 is now available. A Tarball of the source is at:

http://hal.g7iii.net/aprstlm/v1.4/aprstlm-1.4.tar.gz

For those with aprstlm v1.3, there is a patch available at
http://www.xciv.org/aprstlm/v1.4/aprstlm-1.3-1.4.patch.gz.
Gunzip and apply with patch -p1

Buiding:

To build, you will need a standard gcc install, as well as the
ncurses development libraries. Building is simple, just type
make in the aprstlm-1.4 directory. A binary, called aprstlm
is created.

Running:

There are now two modes of running aprstlm. One is that you
give it an APRS server and port, and it connects to it, and
awaits telemetry from the specified satellite, eg:

./aprstlm -sat PCSAT -aprs aprshost.somenet.com 14580


aprstlm however, can now read from stdin. This was needed,
when implementing support for Castor and Pollux, as it was
not certain all IGATEs would pass their telemetry frames,
and indeed, as they are not strictly APRS packets, then some
do not.

How you get the AX25 frames to aprstlm's stdin is up to you.
I don't have any radios up at the moment, but something like
the axlisten command might well be useful, or alternatively,
just an netcat to an APRS server, or a local TNC would suffice.
  To run in stdin mode, add the -stdin flag, eg :

nc arprs.somehost.net 14580 | ./aprstlm -sat POLLUX -stdin

Please note, by using the stdin mode, the keyboard is disabled,
you must use Control C to exit the program, not "Q", as documented.

Also, you will only see the Engineering Telemetry values
screen, not the raw values screen. This is due to the way
I "hijacked" the internals of aprstlm to work for castor and
pollux without having to redo most of the code.

Other features remain the same as previous versions, and
a brief (and way out of date, but still relevant)web page
which documents v1.0 is at http://www.xciv.org/~iain/aprstlm

New Features in Version 1.4:

    o Support for Castor and Pollux ("The Twins")
    o Read from stdin mode (but disables the keyboard)
    o Some core improvements, that should make it easier
      to add further AX25 satellites later


Version 1.4 is not really very polished at the moment, but it
does display telemetry from castor and pollux. With pollux only
meant to be with us for 6 months, I wanted to get this out
there as soon as possible.

I do intend to release 1.4.1, which should be able to process the
MEMS telemetry packet as well, as soon as Ivan gets the chance
to post the equations and details.

Also, the predict mode doesn't work for castor and pollux yet,
as we don't have confirmed NORAD object numbers, or epoch times
(Exactly when they were released from the shuttle)

Further improvements (esp to the castor and pollux displays) will
most likely be in 1.4.1 as well


73s

Iain