Sorry for this. This holiday xmas new year TLE edition is a bit over the top… please bear with me.
begining from this thread:
This time, I want to share how I found b* drag using a simple method with the existing tools ikhnos and current tle. i use lapan-a2_2025-12-03_v1.txt (149 Bytes) from this post . other tools you can use as alternate is SatNOGS Artifacts - Waterfall Viewer. check here about these tools.
LAPAN-A2
1 40931U 25337.49374902 .00000000 00000-0 -12415-2 0 04
2 40931 6.0006 131.0605 0012733 338.8432 257.3957 14.79033923 03
as you can see, the current b* drag value is -12415-2 . This is a bad number. A negative value means that the drag is very fast, making the TLE become outdated in just a few days. However, this satellite is at an altitude of over 600 km, which means the drag should be slow.
so what i do is i just try positive number around 11000 to 70000 (1.1e-4 or 0.11e-3 to 7.0e-4 or 0.7e-3)
for example, i try 70000e-3
so the new tle will like this:
LAPAN-A2
1 40931U 25337.49374902 .00000000 00000-0 70000-3 0 02
2 40931 6.0006 131.0605 0012733 338.8432 257.3957 14.79033923 03
and then i copy paste all second line to online TLE checksum, like this:
and then replace 02 with correct crc number 08, so the tle become like this:
LAPAN-A2
1 40931U 25337.49374902 .00000000 00000-0 70000-3 0 08
2 40931 6.0006 131.0605 0012733 338.8432 257.3957 14.79033923 03
i hope you understand
and i repeat above task with another numbers between 11000-3 and 70000-3
the next step is test each of this tle with real observation. I choose observation with a date that is much newer than the TLE date, deliberately selecting observations where the center frequency is no longer centered. in this example i choose obs 13022563
the next step is create waterfall image for each tle set using ikhnos, the command like this:
./ikhnos.py -r 24 -f 0.8 -t lapan-a2_2025-12-03_DRAG.txt 13022563
-r 24 = sample rate 24khz
-f 0.8 = The default is 0, but I set it to 0.8 because this station likely has a ppm error. The goal is to ensure the signal in the waterfall is positioned in the center.
-t = the tle set file name.
13022563 = satnogs observation id
here the result:
as you can see and compare, the best waterfall (the red line follow the signal), is when b*drag value 12800e-3
so the best tle become:
LAPAN-A2
1 40931U 25337.49374902 .00000000 00000-0 12800-3 0 02
2 40931 6.0006 131.0605 0012733 338.8432 257.3957 14.79033923 03
So what’s next? I will use this b* drag value 12800e-3 as a reference for the next TLE of Lapan IO-86
LAPAN-A2
1 40931U 25360.30710720 .00000000 00000-0 12800-3 0 00
2 40931 6.0006 332.5373 0012733 338.8432 8.1437 14.79075515 01
lapan-a2_2025-12-26_v4.txt (149 Bytes)
obs-2025-12-26-v4-done.dat (2.2 KB)
sites.txt (1.0 KB)