AmsatDroid Free Returns From the Dead as a Fully Rebuilt Android Satellite Tracker

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Some apps age gracefully. Others need a proper resurrection — and that's exactly what's just happened to a long-standing favourite in the satellite operating community.

David Johnson, G4DPZ, has announced that he's brought AmsatDroid Free back to life as a completely new implementation. Rather than patch the old app, which had fallen behind the Android platform over time, Johnson rebuilt it from scratch in Kotlin with a modern Jetpack Compose interface — while keeping the same proven SGP4/SDP4 orbit-prediction core (predict4java) under a regression test, ensuring predictions stay just as accurate as before.

What It Does

The rebuilt app brings a solid feature set for anyone working satellites:

  • Pass prediction for your location, complete with a sky view and ground-track map

  • Doppler-corrected downlink and uplink frequencies, updated live during a pass, including support for inverting (U/V) transponders

  • Transponder frequencies sourced from Peter Goodhall's (MM9SQL) OscarWatch database, synced automatically to stay current

  • Pass alerts, with a countdown notification and optional spoken announcements

  • A compass-oriented sky chart and aiming aid for handheld antennas

  • An all-satellite overview showing what's up now and what's coming soon

  • A home-screen widget for your next pass

  • Automatic Keplerian element updates from Celestrak or AMSAT

  • Tablet and foldable layouts, per-app language support, and a red night mode to protect your night vision while observing

Availability

AmsatDroid Free runs on Android 11 and later, and is free and open source under the GPL-3.0 license. The source code, along with screenshots, is available now on GitHub. It's expected to land on the Google Play Store within a few days, once account setup completes.

A nice bit of good news for anyone who'd been missing this one from their satellite toolkit.