It's all about the Software

Feeling a bit embarrased.
I have been experimenting with satellites using the latest release of SDR-RADIO v3.1 Build 2496.
I ran with the "catalogue.tle" from Celestrak quite successfully although the 4MB file took a few minutes to load everything worked normally.
That was until I added an extra file containing "Westwood Needles". Very briefly these are clumps of copper resonant at 8.4GHz with needle like shape put into MEO in 1961.
After a mass protest the US Mil stopped the project - Mr. Musk took up the reigns and decided to put an active system in place

Anyway....the result is that processing of these files seems to have caused a problem where SDR-Radio consumes moire and more memory until it sucks the life out of the Windows 10 system.
The only way to move forward is to reboot.
Sadly now everytime I launch the Satellite option welll....I end up with a dead machine.
It appears to load updated files, take a stab at display a satellite then stops as it sits down to work out what to do next. It churns away using resources increasingly (I extended the pagiing file to see if I could persuade it to continue, but even then it just gobbled it up. After about 30 minutes SR-Radio starts releases resources (as it got stuck somewhere and the OS decided it was unnecessarily using memeory), eventually reach 21MB but no CPU activity. The Not Responding message have been displayed alongside SDR-Radio shortly aftrer I launched the satelllite option.
I can't use the satellite option as everytime I launch it in SDR-Rario all resources are gobbled away..

Is there a way I can somehow edit some of the xml files to remove satellite groups?
I don't want to reset everything as I have rather a lot invested in frequencies and satellites and would be seriously unhappy to lose everything.

I know Simon loves a screenshot so have included what I can once all resources have been exhausted

73
Nick - g4ogi

Hi,

Send me or attach the Westwood Needles file you added. If I can crash this here then it's easy to fix.

Here are the files after SDR-Radio has processed them
Looking at the raw dta the celestrak catalongue.tle file appears to have addional blank lines (line breaks?)
Guess this is the problem

...and the raw data but I had to rename the file from .tle to txt in order to include them

OK,

Thanks - that's a massive file, you've obviously exposed some inefficient code somewhere...

So,

Some *very* inefficient code found because you have almost 24,000 entries in the file! Anyway this is now working, I have a bit of code to review tomorrow morning then I'll give you a kit for testing.

Thanks Simon.
I was testing out some of the changes appearing in 2-line and 3-line TLEs and the modern way of handling the ever growing satellite catalogue.
Things got out of hand....just goes to show that code gets old.

Look forward to crashing the pc again

nick

g4ogi wrote: ↑Sun Feb 27, 2022 9:04 pm Thanks Simon.
I was testing out some of the changes appearing in 2-line and 3-line TLEs and the modern way of handling the ever growing satellite catalogue.
Things got out of hand....just goes to show that code gets old.

Look forward to crashing the pc again

nick

To be honest you did uncover a bug / bad coding so I'm grateful for this.

Hi,

I've sent you a Private Message (PM) with a link.

Hi Simon,
The new kit still failed when I initially ran it with my then current settings. Whilst SDR-Radio appeared to keep procesing and memory management was much better, after 35 minutes I could not start any other resource to allow me to investigate what was going on. Disk activity was non-existent so SDR-Radio was processor bound (at about 92%).
When I could not run Firefox I stopped SDR-Radio (which the system did), but I started to get the odd graphics related error.
Only way to get the machine back to normal was a cold boot (but not an Executive reset).

I decided to replace cataloge.tle and miscellaneous.tle, these were the two files containing a) the full active objects catalog b) objects of interest (LES and Westwood Needles).
The replacement files were blank.

On satellite startup SDR-Radio went into think mode for just over 5 minutes and cpu sat at only 12%-17% and memory usage climbed to about 8GB. Then all came back to normal.
I assume the time it took at the start of the satellite switch was due to sorting out the new cache.

Thanks for the help I can report that all seems well and I know now that my current system is unhappy handling such a large number of objects.
Next task is to try loading Westwood Needles as a separate entity.....

Incidentally response of the satellite console is much faster.

An observations ia that the cache file "SDRSatelliteTracking_DefaultKeplerianData.txt" is still at 4MB. Amsat data appears as expected with no additional LF (or extra lines) but data from Celestrak appears with extra lines between each entry as:-

from amsat/nasabare.txt
AO-07
1 07530U 74089B 22055.83283865 -.00000019 00000-0 16660-3 0 9993
2 07530 101.8924 35.4005 0011936 257.8627 217.7205 12.53653074163590

from http://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/tle-new.txt
ONEWEB-0461

1 51649U 22012AD 22058.91667824 -.01021228 00000+0 -41936-1 0 9993

2 51649 87.4076 355.6885 0016019 185.0990 314.5660 15.26848701 3907



Not sure if this is a problem.

Nick - g4ogi