Data, Debug, and Past Ham Radio POTA Activations

It's kinda awesome to have data!

Earlier today I was working on the elevation profile project I've been writing about throughout the week. I've moved the project up to the point where an enrichment provides the elevation at the transmit location of the QSO, (my end of the path.) Looking at the results, at first I thought I must have introduced a bug at some point. The first two QSO elevations were meters and 3 meters high. That seemed awfully close to sea level, especially considering that most of my POTAs are made from the sides of various mountains. Looking at the table row for the 3 meter QSO I inspected the date: March 14th of 2024. I checked my photos to see where the gang and I were on that day and found this

So! We were at just about sea level, that being the sea just to the right-hand side of the picture.

What about the two meter high QSO? At this point it occurred to me that I didn't need to look back at pictures to see where we'd been on the 23rd of March of last year. Instead I could simply look at the QSO on the maps produced by the kml plugin for Datasette. When I did, I found this:

I was at Robert W. Crown Memorial State Beach on Alameda just south of Oakland.

Automated elevation profiles aren't a part of the QSO logging package quite yet, but being able to easily visualize data that was easy to capture and store from over a year ago has made debug a breeze in this case! After reviewing the data above, I video from that POTA site as well.

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