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Ionogram Notes about KO6BTY de JJ2JQF

 The recent pair of QSOs to Japan from Project TouCans from Great Basin National Park has me wondering about F2 layer ionospheric skip propagation again.

I got our F2 skips working for CZML. Here's a look at the skip path for JJ2JQF de KO6BTY. Notice the Earedson ionosonde is almost right in the middle


Here's the map to take a look at 


Note that the path goes for a little while underground. However, Hugyens:


Check out the mountains that can act as a knife-edge barrier creating  new source.


Query for JJ2JQF

select
  tx_lng,
  tx_lat,
  rx_lng,
  rx_lat,
  rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp,
  rm_rnb_history_pres.dB,
  rm_rnb_history_pres.Spotter,
  haversine(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng) as total_path,
  gis_partial_path_lat(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng, 200) as el_lat,
  gis_partial_path_lng(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng, 200) as el_lng,
  id,
  strftime('%Y%m%d', timestamp) as date,
  strftime('%H%M', timestamp) as time,
  'US-0032' as park,
  'KD0FNR' as call
from
  rm_rnb_history_pres
where
  dB > 100
  and timestamp > '2024-05-24T13:45:00'
  and timestamp < '2024-05-24T14:57:00'
order by
  rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp desc


Query for JG0AWE

select
  tx_lng,
  tx_lat,
  rx_lng,
  rx_lat,
  rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp,
  rm_rnb_history_pres.dB,
  rm_rnb_history_pres.Spotter,
  haversine(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng) as total_path,
  gis_partial_path_lat(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng, 200) as el_lat,
  gis_partial_path_lng(tx_lat, tx_lng, rx_lat, rx_lng, 200) as el_lng,
  id,
  strftime('%Y%m%d', timestamp) as date,
  strftime('%H%M', timestamp) as time,
  'US-0032' as park,
  'KD0FNR' as call
from
  rm_rnb_history_pres
where
  dB > 100
  and timestamp > '2024-05-24T13:45:00'
  and timestamp < '2024-05-24T14:57:00'
order by
  rm_rnb_history_pres.timestamp desc


And the data went away!



Notice that the table on the left isn't there. Take a look at the JJ2JQF data (two days later) for comparison





Sources of Ionosphere and specifically F2 data from around the world

New to me: Mirrion ionosonde images from NOAA. I haven't seen this page before. Not super-useful to me because it points at images, not numeric data.

Lowell Digisonde Station list: Handy map of where stations exist.

CZML and HTML style comments

Apparently, they just don't work. We had to take our comments back out.

Accessing data via URL

We use an address like this

https://lgdc.uml.edu/common/DIDBGetValues?ursiCode=PA836&charName=hF2,hmF2&fromDate

to pull in ionosonde data. To access different stations, you need different ursiCode values, (one per station.) These can be found at https://www.digisonde.com/ under the URSI column.

This URL worked great in the browser, but thanks to this issue, stumbled a few times in the czml plugin's calls to get_f2m.

References

Ionosonde Data

This was made possible with data collected by 


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