CrabTrack
I am a lifelong amateur radio operator, and one of my favorite modes is data or FM via satellite. I’ve actually exchanged messages with astronauts in space, using store and forward packet mailboxes. I’ve also made contact on 2m and 70cm FM voice with folks hundreds of miles from my station using a space station as a repeater.
Through all those experiences, I’ve tried a range of satellite tracking software, including both text based and graphical applications.
Say hello to CrabTrack
Lately, I’ve had great fun vibe engineering, and I wanted to take a shot at working on a satellite tracking application of my own in Rust as both a throw back to the text mode trackers I first used, and to further learn the language.
CrabTrack is a simple TUI based satellite tracker written in Rust. It has one screen to display a range of useful information about satellites orbiting the Earth.
You can use it with Two Line Element (TLE) data files to track a range of satellites orbiting the Earth. You can also learn when a satellite will becomes visible from your location or when they pass within communication range.
Take it for a spin
You can try CrabTrack yourself by following the steps described in the project documentation.
Take a look under the hood
These technical details describe some of the choices made in the minimal design of CrabTrack.
I helped guide an LLM to build CrabTrack using crates like these: