Turns out the F2 is really high: Finally! QSO Specific F2 Visualization

 OK, so this is just kinda cool!

Suppose you're operating near mountains and are curious if your QSOs are hopping over the mountains, or if they're knife edge diffracting after smacking right into the mountain. You'll need to know how high the F2 layer was between your station and the receiving station and you'll need to be able to visulaize the path with respect to the mountain.

It's taken a while, but we have that now! 

Thanks to the GloTEC data curtesy of the NOAA, we know the F2 heights all over the world at the time of each QSO. We can also map our QSOs on a Cesium map with toplogy. This allows us to start with maps like this:

where I wondered on the day of the QSO if TouCans' signal would clear the high way embankment, and found out that yes, yes it did.

Check out the interactive map below. It has all the QSOs loaded with their actual F2 skip heights.