Introduction and Fatal but subtle Error in Element Manager!!

Rick von Glahn (rickvg@usa.net)
Sun, 20 Dec 1998 02:58:24 -0700

Greetings SeeSat-L

I am Rick von Glahn, the author of "Element Manager for Windows".

I've been lurking here for a week or so but relying on Jay Respler to pass
along information. I'm not too good at keeping up with listservs or
newsgroups. I try and read all messages with Element Manager in the subject
line, but if you really want to get in touch with me I'd recommend the email
route.

While I appreciate Jay's assistance here and more particularly in helping
debug Element Manager, I feel it's time to "de-lurk" and take the heat for
this program thus relieving Jay of the task of acting as a relay.

Thanks you Jay for all your help here on the SeeSat-L list.

OK, I could have hidden out for a while longer but, Richard_G_Hines
[rghines@mindspring.com] reported a problem with the program that requires
me to immediately report a fatal but (as noted in the subject) subtle error
in Element Manager. I had an error check on line1 of elements that required
that the Norad catalog number be a value greater than zero. But, I
misprogrammed this check so that the program only looked at the last digit
of the catalog number. So... if the program looks at LAGEOS (and numerous
other satellites fitting the profile of this programming error) and sees its
catalog number is "08820", it sees that zero at the end of the NORAD ID and
fails the set thus skipping over and not loading it.

I've fixed this problem and will soon upload the corrected version (1.1.2
and higher) to the website:

http://www.eoss.org/elementmanager/download.htm

I apologize for this error. It is quite subtle. When you load a Kelso
tle-new.txt file it skips over 33 satellites that all have Norad IDs ending
in zero.

Richard, thanks for reporting this problem. It took me quite a while to
discover just what was causing the glitch. But, that time was well worth it.
This problem is extremely serious and happily squashed.

I've added a few more changes. Check

http://www.eoss.org/elementmanager/version.htm

for the details.

--
 
cul -- Rick - N0KKZ