[amsat-bb] Re: future apogee calculation

[Vince Fiscus, KB7ADL]

At 05:07 PM 2/25/2010 +0000, Bob- W7LRD <w7lrd at comcast.net> wrote:
>Hello Is there a "easy" way of figuring out where/when a given apogee will 
>at a given lat.long?  I want to try to predetermine when the apogee will 
>be on AO-7 to favor the northern hemisphere.  To "maybe" help in dx 
>contacts.  The difference is only bout 17km in altitude, it just might 
>streeeetch the footprint enough.  Also just how much does the 17km add to 
>the footprint?  73 Bob W7LRD


Bob,

I don't think the difference between apogee and perigee on a LEO with a 
fairly circular orbit really makes that much of difference.  So instead of 
the apogee, what you really want to know are all the longitudes where the 
sub satellite point reaches it's most northern most latitude.  You could 
probably write on script for filtering the output of some of the older 
satellite tracking programs that only makes a 
date-time-latitude-and-longitude entry whenever the SSP gets above a 
certain latitude.

KB7ADL