SatTracker 4+

Like the title says – Finally! It’s about time someone invests quality time in developing an application to track satellites for the Mac – the direct download of current ephemeris from CelesTrack is a bonus. I like the fact that you can select the backdrop for the map – nothing like having the ability to just get the data you need and move on or use the NASA Blue Marble background to spruce things up a bit. The ability to add custom stations is a great feature and makes it truly customizable. It would be nice to be able to plot out (x,y) the classical orbital elements (i.e. nodal period, LAAN, eccentricity and such) based on the historical ephemeris of a particular satellite, a readout of a sat-to-ground site distance (NRT), 3D view where the orbital planes and various phases the satellites reside within could be viewed, one last thing would be displaying the distances between one satellite to another.

Adding those features, IMHO, would make it a ‘Pro’ application – though as it stands right now it is definitely magnitudes above a ‘Basic’ title.

Thanks for the positive review! And thanks for recognising that to produce *accurate* multi-satellite tracking is a considerable effort. The "custom station" is indeed an extra -- standard satellite ground stations are what professional users use, but the ability to add your own (including now in v. 1.2 reading the horizon data from file) is good for amateurs. Plotting the evoulution of elements is a completely different job and not really practical for this type of software. It would need regular updates of all TLEs and for all the data to be kept available. This would rapidly lead to massive disk storage use. This job would be better done in a free-standing software where a limited number of satellites of interest could be identified. The other features are interesting but were not on the original requirments list.

I love this app. It's almost perfect in my opinion. It's only lacking the ability to zoom and adjust the size of the objects. It's hard to track a tiny dot and small words that are jumbled together with other objects I'm tracking. If you could incorporate some satellite/object sizing options and ability to zoom in on the map this would be the perfect app. I hope we see those features in future updates.

We will add this to the wishlist of future features.

We know it's been a while since the last update but we are a small team and are working on several other apps at the same time (both for maintenance and new ones).

I work in the space business and this app is awesome! I don’t agree at all with MacDaddy077 and don’t see what his problem is. He doesn’t explain it actually.

This is the only app on the Mac which does what we need in the space business. All the satellites in the Celestrak database are there, even debris fragments, and are easy to manage. Lots of ground stations can be used at the same time if needed and are handled in a very professional and easy way. It even displays the South Atlantic Anomaly (where satellites can suffer glitches caused by radiation in the van Allen belts) and no other app does that! There are some missing features such as producing lists of upcoming passes, but the Time Control can help there, because it changes the time forwards or back so you can see where the satellite will be.

I would normally have given this a 4 due to the (few) missing features, but I’m rating it 5 to counteract what I think is an unfair review here.

This is the Basic version and the developer’s website mentions a SatTracker Pro which will hopefully provide these features. Even so: highly recommended!

Thanks for the great review!