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Version History
Latest Version Announcements
I've started a Yahoo Groups mailing list to function as a place for users to
discuss the program and for me to have an easy way to announce new versions. If
you wish to be informed when a new version is available subscribe to this list.
You can do so from the "Mailing List Page" of the
Element Manager website.
Current Known BUGS!
Should you find a bug, please report it. There are only a couple of dozen
regular users of the program. The odds that you turn up something no one else
does are significant.
New Program and Section added
I wrote a little utility that will check the age of a particular element
file and pop up an alert if the age of the most recent element set in that
file is older than an age you specify. See the
Miscellaneous Utilities page or go
straight to EleAge to see what it's all about
Version Information
Can't find the current version??? Check the notes at the bottom of this page.
BETAs are posted at the bottom of the Download Page.
Looking for older version information, CLICK HERE
Confused by version numbers reported by Windows on the program's property
page? See the note at the bottom of this page before assuming you have an old
version.
Version 1.6.0 (beta3 29-May-2007)
 | Skip Sanders wanted a way to select anything but certain objects. This is
an attempt to exclude the rocket bodies and debris from a file resulting in
more accurate representation of actual working orbital objects. If you go to the selection screen,
click on the "Misc" tab, you will note that under the common name search there
is a new option, Exclude. You can type in anything you wish to be excluded
from the currently selected element sets. You can also type in multiple terms
separated by commas and an either or search will remove items with any of the
terms listed. For instance, my current satellite DB has 10,690 objects in it.
If I enter "deb" as the common name to be excluded, the list is reduced to
4,429 objects. If I enter in "r/b" the list is reduced to 9,203 objects. And,
if I enter in "r/b,deb" the list is trimmed to 2,658 objects. If
there is a satellite named "REDEB" it will be excluded. The solution, enter a
leading space, "r/b, deb". You can enter leading and/or trailing spaces to
help refine the exclusion parameters. Excellent
suggestion Skip, thanks. |
Version 1.6.0 (beta2 26-Mar-2007)
| Recently the full keplerian element file at Space-Track exceeded 10,000
objects. I had hardcoded an upper limit into the program of 10K. This release
bumps the maximum record size up to 20,000 objects. Don't forget to adjust
whatever limits you want to use on the setup screen as far as warnings and
limitations. Beta2 is posted on the bottom fo the download page |
Version 1.6.0 (beta1 26-Nov-2005)
| After Space-Track took over the distribution of element sets, they
modified the Satellite Situation Report. I've fixed only the rip feature on
the utility menu to now extract the data into a spreadsheet. The box score
data is NOT displayed in the program. I'll work on that in the future perhaps.
But, this program is getting a bit old in the tooth. |
| To enhance the SSR converter in the previous version, you can now specify
to NOT export certain classes of satellites - those with no elements, those
marked as debris and those marked as rocket bodies. |
| A Satellite element set provider has begun appending a character "C" to
the end of element sets. Element Manager will ignore this character, truncate
the line to 69 characters in length and continue to work as before. I'm
researching the "C". If it has utility, I will program to take advantage of
what this letter and possibly other characters appearing in the 70th column
denote. |
Version 1.5.9 (19-August-2003)
| I've added a Satellite Situation Report
converter that will read those files and export them to a Comma Delimited
spread sheet file. |
| If you associated a file type (TLE most likely) with Element Manager, when
you double clicked on it, the memorized window placements were not correctly
loading and you had to reset them to your preferred locations. Fixed. |
Version 1.5.8 (31-August-2002)
| Found a bug in the duplicate element set removal routines for element set
archives (files containing multiple element sets for a single Norad Cat
number). Fixed |
| The Drag and Drop functionality was broken. That's now fixed and you can
drag an element file onto the EM icon and it loads properly. |
Version 1.5.7 (13-March-2002)
| I was talking to a friend of mine, Rick KBØVBZ, one of the AMSAT guys in
Colorado and he was commenting on how useful a next rise feature was in one of
his programs. I thought it was a good idea, so, I've added that to Element
Manager. From the Main Screen Menu select "View/Next Rise (all sats)" and a
screen opens where you make a couple of option selections. Then the program
will compute rise times for all active satellites. See the
Next Rise web page for an overview. |
| For some unknown reason, a readme file from a program I recently installed
snuck into the full install last time out. I have NO idea how that happened.
Regardless, it's removed and a "real" readme reinstalled. |
Version 1.5.6 (12-December-2001)
| For keyboard shortcut fans, I've added Ctrl+X to cut elements from the
main screen, Ctrl+C to copy them and Ctrl+V to paste them. I get the STS
elements via email and every day during a mission there are several updates.
This keyboarding makes it easier and faster to cut and paste them from the
emails into the program. |
Version 1.5.5 (10-November-2001)
| Pierre Molitor discovered some bad behavior. If you open the map display
and track a satellite AND click on the next or previous orbit button THEN
close the tracking screen, when you next open it the tracking system is still
set to the time that resulted in the search for the next/previous satellite
rise. I've fixed this. Now, if you leave the map screen open you can click on
any satellites on the main screen and they will be displayed in their orbital
position as set on the map screen. But, if you close the map and reopen it it
will default to the system time (with any offset you may have created). |
| I've rewritten the way EM calculates orbits. Previously, I was using a
loop to just constantly monitor the time and when a second had passed I
recomputed the orbit. Now, I've instituted an interrupt driven method that
uses a timer to call the orbital calculations. Using a loop, the program was
constantly running and chewed up processor cycles (100% cpu usage). Using the
interrupt method this falls to around 5% cpu usage. VB programs are pretty
well behaved and will yield the processors to other applications even when
running at 100%, but this new method will offer much better system utilization
and perhaps offer battery (notebook) users a more efficient use of power. I
tried everything I could think of to test this new routine out but if you find
a bug somewhere let me know. One thing you will notice. When you click on a
satellite you may have to wait for one second to pass before it appears on the
tracking display. I think this is a fair trade off for better overall
performance. |
| Did you just install Windows XP? Did you notice program windows were being
truncated? See my
notes about this "problem" HERE. In the meantime, I've bit the bullet (for
Element Manager at least) and resized all the screens so they display properly
under Luna. This was actually necessary as some of the resizable screens were
not displaying properly, well they displayed properly but sometimes the text
that bordered the bottom of resizable windows was being clipped. |
| When on the main screen you choose "Select/Load Select File" the program
would properly load the select file into memory but would not properly apply
it to the active satellites when the "Run" button on the select screen was
pressed. Fixed |
| If you opened the "Orbital Data" page and clicked on "Plot Satellite" the
tiny window that controls the orbit on the Tracking Screen would pop open.
I've disabled that. |
Version 1.5.4 (18-April-2001)
| Willy Vermeiren of Belgium discovered a problem that may be related to
either the new run time files or regional settings. As as a first step in
resolving this, I've recompiled the program using the new Visual Basic Service
Pack 5 updates. So, everyone downloading this version of the program should
also download the latest runtimes too. Links on the download page to that
update are now available. |
| Steve discovered that the label on the Perigee chart was in error and said
Apogee. Fixed. |
| Andy Smith wanted to do some work on element sets in Excel. While there is
an export capability, I decided to add apogee and perigee heights to the
exported 2 line elements. If some other calculated value would be of interest
in that export routine, let me know and I'll consider adding it. |
| Related to the above, I renamed the items under [File/Export ASCII File]
to [File Export Spreadsheet File CSV]. That is possibly more informative than
that plain vanilla ASCII file terminology. |
Version 1.5.3 (15-February-2001)
| Andy Smith discovered a bug in the Archive Analysis screen. At times, the
program would crash when loading a file with between 100 and 300 element sets.
Fixed. |
| Discovered a bug where the satellite range was not displaying on the
Tracking Map. Fixed. If you open the Tracking Data screen it should appear in
version 1.5.2 (Show Text on the Tracking Screen Menu). |
Version 1.5.2 (13-January-2001)
| After adding the radar display I decided to add a quick way to move
forward and backward in time to find satellite rise/set events. Now, when you
open the Tracking screen a small window appears in the bottom right corner of
that screen with the buttons "Previous", "Realtime" and "Next" (shown on the
screen capture on the Tracking View Page). Press
one of those buttons and the program moves forwards or backwards in time until
the selected satellite is rising over your "home" location.
I also added the ability for the user to set any time to begin tracking. This
is under the Time Mode menu on the Tracking screen.
I also made sure that when you generate a pass schedule, the starting time for
that schedule is what ever is current on the tracking screen. In this way you
can move forward a week or two and then run pass predictions for that time.
The annoying "Not available" or "above horizon" messages on that screen are
pretty much a thing of the past with the exception of satellites with Mean
Motions of less than 1.2 revs per day.
|
| Related to the above, I had to build routines to find pass starts and ends
and so, the Track Data screen (see the Tracking View Page) now shows much more
accurate and rapidly updated calculations for the interval to the next rise or
set of the satellite. |
| Helmut Burghardt discovered that some values in the initialization file (weleman.ini)
were not being properly read by computers in Germany. I believe I have fixed
this. |
| He also noted that the Azimuth and Elevation values on the Radar screen
were scrambled in German regional settings. That is fixed. |
| And he noted there might be a problem on the Orbital Screen with the
Maximum Elevation displays. I made some changes there and that should be fixed
now too.
|
| One other minor thing. I changed the map file formats to GIFs. This only
reduces the executable file size, but I thought it was probably a good idea.
The zip distributions don't reflect any gain in compression. Maybe the program
will load slightly faster this way. |
Version 1.5.1 (11-January-2001)
| Kevin Fetter requested a "Radar" display. It is common enough in the
tracking community. And it wasn't all that hard to add. See the
"Radar" page for details |
| Pierre Molitor has been busy again detecting bugs. Apparently, I missed a
bunch of them using the [File/View-Edit] text editor. These are fixed now. |
| Pierre also wanted me to change the reporting screen when updating element
files. With version 1.5.0 and before, when updating elements, only those
elements that were updated would be listed on the update report screen. Pierre
wanted to see which element sets were not updated as well. So, I've redesigned
this screen to include that info. See Updating Elements
for a screen shot. |
Version 1.5.0 (22-December-2000)
| Pierre Molitor discovered a few bugs. If you elected to view the ReadMe
file for a new version of the program, trying to close or minimize that viewer
would crash the program. That's fixed. |
| Pierre also was displeased with the fact that the Splash Screen was
disappearing so quickly, he had no chance to read the "reminders". I've added
a new Tab on the Setup Screen where you can specify how long you wish the
splash screen to display. It is limited to between 2 and 20 seconds, or you
can set it to either NEVER close (until you click on it) or alternatively,
never open in the first place. |
| Pierre also had a good point about the "Quick Rise" screen. If you clicked
on Quick Rise, the screen would open, and the same satellite you were pointing
to on the Main screen would be highlighted in RED on the Quick Rise screen.
However, there was no indication that it was above the horizon (with this
highlighting) so ... If the satellite you happen to be pointing to on the main
screen is above the horizon, when you open the Quick Rise screen it is now
highlighted in YELLOW. Yellow will indicate that the satellite is the
currently selected satellite and it is above the horizon. If the satellite is
highlighted in Red (as on the main screen) it means it's selected, but not
above the horizon. |
Version 1.4.9 (19-December-2000)
| I was playing with Nova for Windows and really liked the playing of wave
files on Rise and Set of satellites. So, I've added that. Go to the Setup
Screen and select sounds and pick wav files for rise and set. They will play
when that event occurs. I'm not packing any wav files with the distribution.
You will find lots of them in the \Windows\Media folder. You might even want
to record your own. |
| Another feature in Nova that appears in many tracking programs is a
"global" what's up feature. I've incorporated this into Element Manager. From
the View menu option on the main screen select Quick Rise. A smaller version
of the main screen that contains ONLY the satellites as listed on the main
screen opens on top of the main screen. Satellites that are currently above
your horizon will be highlighted by a green background. See the
Quick Rise page for more details or at least a
snapshot. |
| Related to the above, you can go to the selection screen and, under the
visual tab, select "Satellites above Horizon" and the program will examine all
active satellites and select out only those currently above the horizon. Once
this selection is made, no further checking is made on the satellite's
position status. So, it will soon be out of date. But, this is a way to
quickly see how many and which satellites are currently up. |
| On the Tracking Screen - under Map Setup there is now a new option,
"Labels on Map". If you check this item then Element Manager will place the
Azimuth and Range to the tracked satellite on the tracking map. If the
satellite is above the tracking station's horizon, then the Azimuth and
Elevation will be displayed instead. This text is printed on the map beside
the satellite's current position. |
| There is a new option on the Pop up menu that appears when you right click
on a satellite on the main screen. If you click on "Sat Notes" a screen will
open where you can enter data of personal interest to YOU about that
satellite. See the Satellite Notes page for more
details. |
| I've added a "Tip of the Day" display. Each time Element Manager runs, a
new tip will be displayed. You can turn off this feature by unchecking the
"display at startup" box on that window. I welcome useful tips and will add
them as warranted. |
| I saw the obvious need to be able to do away with the Tip screen above,
and it led me to believe there should be a similar capability to banish the
splash screen. No one has complained, but ... there is now a check box on the
splash you can uncheck to get rid of it too. The splash screen should stay on
the screen long enough for you to hit this check box, but if not, remember you
can get it to display from the Help selection on the Main Screen Menu bar.
Likewise, if you wish to restart it after you've done away with it, that's
where to go to get it to display again so you can recheck the display on
startup box. |
| Amateur Radio Operators like to know what the "Phase" of a satellite is.
The phase is essentially the Mean Anomaly, except instead of measured in
degrees, phase is measured in 1/256 increments of an orbit. If MA is 180, then
phase is 128. If MA is 359° then phase is 255.26...
Now, on the "Orbital Screen" or Setup Screen you can select the Mean Anomaly
to be displayed in degrees or Phase. |
| Archive Analysis automatically resorts the element sets by ascending
epochday. However, this was not reflected in the caption of the Element Set
List on the main screen. That's fixed. |
| The readme file was not displaying properly when updating from a previous
version. That's fixed. |
| On the selection screen under Misc., if you entered a partial satellite
name it would only be found if it did NOT end the satellite name. Example,
Lets say you have an archive of the last STS mission which includes two
satellite names for all 30 or 40 element sets. One is "STS-93" and the other
is "STS-93 Dock". Suppose you want to see the archive analysis of this file
but are only interested in seeing changes occurring while the Shuttle is
docked. So, on the selection screen you enter "dock" as the criteria. Because
this "word" was at the end of the search string it would not be found. If you
had entered "doc" you'd be fine. Well, long story short, that's now fixed. |
| In the previous version (1.4.8) I added the capability to automatically
add an epoch year to two line sets that were missing this data. I said it was
dumb, in that it always used the current year as set in the operating system.
I've "fixed" that somewhat. Now, if the epochday is more than 5 days in the
future the previous year is used. This is supposed to take care of element
sets around the first of the year. If you have an element set dated
364.8823xxx with no year and it's now a day or two after newyear, 002.343xxx
then the program decides that that 364 epoch day should be associated with
Last Year. If predicted element sets are generated for a future shuttle
flight, and for some reason, the elset doesn't have an Epoch Year, you might
get an erroneous epoch year generated. Whenever the program creates its own
epoch year for a bird, it always informs you it's doing so and puts a
checkmark beside that element set on the main screen. So, you should be able
to easily find any problems and fix them manually. |
| I wanted a faster way to add an individual satellite to a select list.
Now, right click on any satellite on the main screen and an option to add that
satellite to a select file is available. A dialog box opens pointing to your
Select/Parameters folder. Select the file you wish to add the satellite to and
it is done. The SEL file is dup checked so if you inadvertently try and add
two instances of the same satellite the program will weed out the duplicate. |
Version 1.4.8 (23-October-2000)
| Andre Chesnel, who lives in France, discovered that the Archive Analysis
screen would crash when the Windows Operating system is set to a regional
setting other than the United States. fixed. |
| I also changed the behavior of the button which toggles between epoch day
labels and the date on the charts of the Archive Analysis screen. Now, when
you push the button, the chart immediately refreshes with the new labels. |
| Some element sets, for some reason :-), come from some sites without a
year entered, just blank spaces. EM now will (stupidly) fix this problem. If
columns 19 and 20 on Line 1 are blank, EM will substitute the year as set on
your system clock. This should be fine with one proviso. If you are watching a
satellite at the turn of the year, you may get a bogus year inserted. When the
program detects this type of problem (either in cut and paste or during import
of elements) it will automatically fix, and note which element sets were
fixed. Then, at the end of the operation, it will display a message box
indicating how many element sets were "fixed" and it will mark each fixed
element set with a checkmark beside it on the display. You can then manually
review these changes and fix any problems during the year rollover (I'll
probably add a epoch day comparator to iron this out in the future). Don't
forget, you can sort the file by checked satellites, so you can quickly see
all the fixed sets either at the top or bottom of the file. Take note of the
warning that accompanies the message box, these fixes are only done in memory.
If you agree with the supplied epoch year then you must remember to save the
file. I recommend doing this right away. If you just let the program fix the
epoch year each time it opens the file, sooner or later, you're going to open
the file in a new year and thus, get a bogus epoch year added to the element
set. |
Version 1.4.7 (30-July-2000)
| Kevin Fetter on SeeSat-L noticed a dramatic orbital change in one of the
birds. I thought... that might be nice to do in EM too. So, now the program
will "analyze" a series of element sets and show trend lines for several
parameters. See the Archive Analysis screen
for some details.
Thanks to Allen Thompson and Edward S. Light for pointers to historical
elements and one "complete" set of elements for Mir. Edward, I used your Mir
TLEs for the screenshot.
OH, OIG finally sent along the historical TLE request. I guess it is human
generated as a real person sent the tles not some automated "bot". |
| I tried to fix a TLE's checksum and was thwarted. It seems the elset
had a non-numeric character in the checksum position. In this rare event, the
program now subs a zero so it won't crash. |
| Copy and Pasting element sets that had blank lines mixed within elset
lines failed. That's fixed |
| Saving Tracking Screen settings actually was clearing all settings. Fixed. |
| A hanging "thinking" dialog box popped up when fixing checksums in files
less than 50 elsets long. Fixed. |
| A sticky sort indication atop the satellite list on the main screen when
loading a new file has been fixed. |
Version 1.4.6 (14-July-2000)
| Pierre Molitor requested a track direction to be added to the
Pass Schedule Screen. It's there after the pass
number, an indication of N -> S or whatever direction the satellite is
tracking is included. |
| Jim Kile gets his element sets in a format that isn't recognized by EM.
Everything else is the same, but there is no checksum. I had a complaint about
this previously but it was resolved on the elset creation end. However, it has
cropped up again. So, when all other tests pass, but an elset's 2 line data is
only 68 characters long a zero is appended to the short lines. A message box
pops up warning you about this UNLESS you are opening a file using Checksum
Validation. Then the fix routines pop up to fix the offending zero (if it in
fact is in error). |
| On the Main Screen, you can now press the Delete key to cut the
highlighted element set and press the Insert key to paste an element set. If
you check multiple element sets you can cut them all with the delete key and
then re-paste them elsewhere in the file with the insert key. |
| If you cut an element set, then quit the program it would not prompt you
to save the file (if you had neglected to do that). That's fixed. |
| A bug reappeared. If you open the tracking screen, ask for a pass
prediction and then close the program down it crashed. Since you were leaving
the program it isn't too big a deal, but of course it needed to be fixed and
so, it has been. |
| Pierre Molitor discovered another problem when running the program outside
of the English(US) regional settings. When attempting to update a group of
elements the program would fail to accomplish its task. That's now fixed. |
| Pierre also noticed that it was possible to enter latitudes of >90 degrees
and longitudes of > 180 degrees without the program detecting this problem.
I've implemented some value checking to make sure that the values entered fall
within "real world" conditions. |
| If you selected "Clear" from the main screen's File Menu, the program
would in fact clear the elements but would leave an orphaned progress bar
stuck on the screen. That's fixed. |
notes: This web page may be updated prior to the posting of a
new version. So, seeing a new version described above does not necessarily mean
it's available yet. The definitive current version is listed on the download
page.
Why does this happen? I sometimes update the web pages several
times during the creation of a new version. This reduces the amount of time I
have to spend on the website when a version is finally ready for release.
All version releases listed above have an associated date with
the possible exception of a new version that is still in development. In that
case, the date is replaced by "Not Released".
In all cases, the definitive current version is the one listed
on the download page.
A WARNING about Version
Numbers.
I just got a complaint about version numbers, and with good cause. My posted
version numbers, it seems, are not exactly the same as those reported from
within Windows when you right click on Element Manager (the EXE file) and look
at the property page's version information. VB has three boxes you fill out for
versions. I have placed the three numbers that make up a version in each box. VB
correctly interprets this and places that 3 number version on the About screen
of Element manager but in the Windows property box it comes up somewhat
differently. For example:
Version 1.1.1 in Element Manager will be reported by Windows as
Version 1.01.0001
Mathematically, it's sort of the same, but it's led to some confusion and a
double download. So be aware of this if you check the version of the program
from a property sheet in Windows. The about screen under Help on the Main screen
will correctly show the numbers I use here to differentiate between versions.
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