satellite constellation visualization

Globalstar modelled with SaVi

I've created and run simulations of satellite constellations using SaVi, the Satellite Visualization software that was originally written at the Geometry Center. I began contributing to SaVi while studying at the Centre for Communication Systems Research. Now you can run SaVi, too, on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Irix, Mac OS X, or Cygwin for Microsoft Windows.

My SaVi releases include the constellation simulation scripts I've written, as well as enhanced resizeable coverage and fisheye displays.

For real-time 3D animations, SaVi can use Geomview, also originally written at The Geometry Center. These videos, interactive java animations and renderings of constellations will quickly give you a primitive idea of what Geomview can offer.

SaVi's features are described in the SaVi user manual. Satellite constellations are introduced in a tutorial using SaVi.

Latest development code (19 November 2009) with bugfixes is available.

The SaVi 1.4.2 release (10 February 2009) fixes a rare rounding error when blending colours, makes -redrawn-menus the default on Mac OS X to work around a 10.5 Leopard Tk menubar bug, fixes no_fames typo preventing saving frames from Geomview, adds View Source... option, adds more elevation circles to large fisheyes.

SaVi requires Tcl/Tk. Depending on your installation of Tcl/Tk, you may need to install the tcl-devel package (Red Hat, Fedora) or tcl-dev and tk-dev (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) to obtain header files to compile against.

SaVi is supported via the SaVi users mailing list. There's also a SaVi developers mailing list. SaVi development is stored in the SaVi SourceForge repository.

A service rendering SaVi images on request is available. Any use of SaVi images should credit SaVi (http://savi.sf.net/). There are many examples of use where credit is given.

Lloyd Wood (lloydwood@users.sourceforge.net)
this page last updated for latest code