Orbit Determination Issue (Method of Gauss, in Escobal's text)

[tjcafitz]

So I'm coding up some initial orbit determination stuff in MATLAB (for personal education; I love this stuff), and I am using 'Methods of Orbit Determination' by Escobal as a guide. I already got Vallado's code to work, now I'm just comparing other methods. I'm having an issue with one of his equations, though. Obviously, the method is angles-only, but one of the givens Escobal requires is H_i, and in his nomenclature section he says that H is the "Altitude of satellite measured normal to adopted ellipsoid". So its the altitude, which is an unknown since we don't have the orbit. I don't even have range data. Am I interpreting this part wrong? The reason I care about that variable is that my values for the X, Y, and Z vectors are off, which gives me a small slatn range value, which gives me the incorrect final value. the set of equations is:
G1(i) = a_e/sqrt(1-(2*f-f^2)*sin(phi)^2) + H ;
G2(i) = (1-f)^2*a_e/sqrt(1-(2*f-f^2)*sin(phi)^2) + H ;
X(i) = -G1(i)*cosd(phi)*cosd(theta(i)) ;
Y(i) = -G1(i)*cosd(phi)*sind(theta(i)) ;
Z(i) = -G2(i)*sind(phi) ;

Any ideas/help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I'm sorry you are not finding help at the moment. Is there any additional information you can share with us?

 

[Physics-101]

So I'm coding up some initial orbit determination stuff in MATLAB (for personal education; I love this stuff), and I am using 'Methods of Orbit Determination' by Escobal as a guide. I already got Vallado's code to work, now I'm just comparing other methods. I'm having an issue with one of his equations, though. Obviously, the method is angles-only, but one of the givens Escobal requires is H_i, and in his nomenclature section he says that H is the "Altitude of satellite measured normal to adopted ellipsoid". So its the altitude, which is an unknown since we don't have the orbit. I don't even have range data. Am I interpreting this part wrong? The reason I care about that variable is that my values for the X, Y, and Z vectors are off, which gives me a small slatn range value, which gives me the incorrect final value. the set of equations is:
G1(i) = a_e/sqrt(1-(2*f-f^2)*sin(phi)^2) + H ;
G2(i) = (1-f)^2*a_e/sqrt(1-(2*f-f^2)*sin(phi)^2) + H ;
X(i) = -G1(i)*cosd(phi)*cosd(theta(i)) ;
Y(i) = -G1(i)*cosd(phi)*sind(theta(i)) ;
Z(i) = -G2(i)*sind(phi) ;

Any ideas/help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi!

Do you have Vallado's code maybe? I would really like to take a look at it :)
Thanks!