F2 Skip Maps: a Project TouCans Side Project

Diaze (the 12 year old kid here) and I are adding F2 skip paths to the QSO maps from Project TouCans. One point of the project is to give us us an opportunity for Diaze to learn Python. Another point is to better visualize what the radio is doing with real-time data—within a 7 minute window—about the F2 layer! I'll talk more about unschooling and learning Python in another post, for now, here are some of the results we're seeing!

Yesterday I made a single QSO to VE7ZD in Canada. Mapping it with our new code additions I can see that the radio did it's usual thing of hitting the stations in the Bay area first. Stanford led the way

The map immediately brings up a good question. What do we do for ground wave comms? Another good question is, are they always ground wave, or are some of them veritical incidence skywave? I believe Stanford is mostly ground wave because moving the antenna a bit in the backyard turns W6YX off for us, but anyway.

A minute later, the rest of the daytime RBN usual suspects came into view.

Notice that while you can see a marker for NU6XB, there's no sky marker. That's because... That's because... There's maybe a bug in the program? (It's good to document, you find stuff like this.) Because on further inspection, NU6XB is there, it's just got the default—I couldn't find F2 data—height.... Weird

Weird. Anyway.

Time proceeds and a minute later, there's VE7ZD!

I hear what your saying though. Does it really track F2 height from Pt. Arguello? All those paths had the same height!

The answer is, absolutely it does! Check out this map from my most recent POTA. Notice that KB9RPG and KF9R, are located very close to each other in Indiana, but the F2 layer was at a different height during each of my POTA QSOs with them!

The ionosonde at Pt. Arguello updates every 7 minutes, so the first example all fell in a single data sample. The POTA however... It had things to see!

Credits:

This was made possible with data collected by

Reinisch, B. W., and I. A. Galkin, Global ionospheric radio observatory (GIRO), Earth, Planets, and Space, 63, 377-381, doi:10.5047/eps.2011.03.001, 2011.

http://spase.info/SMWG/Observatory/GIRO

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