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F2 Dev Notes and US-4571 at City College San Francisco a Week Apart

 This week I spent some time tightening up the workflow for comparing F2 ionospheric data across different POTA outings. It turns out documentation really does matter. By writing things down, I’ve not only made the manual process clearer but also pushed the automated flow forward. With GPT-5’s help on documenting proton and electron flux plots, and my own notes on numeric F2 graphs along QSO paths, the project is steadily becoming easier to repeat and share.

I put in a little bit of time working on being able to easily compare F2 data for different POTA outings this morning. It turns out documentation really does matter, so I've been focusing a bit more on it. I have a number of tools that allowed me to pull in F2 data quickly. This week I've been trying to spend time pulling them into an automated flow. As I've implemented this flow, I've discovered that I haven't taken the time to document the tools I've already built. 

I asked GPT5 to document the solar proton and electron flux plot creation KO6BTY and I have been working on this week. The result was a pretty decent doc that I want to mull over for a bit.

The second piece of documentation had to do with creating numeric graphs of F2 values along a QSO path. The process is clunky at the moment, but getting better all the time. In one of those really nice programming professor sors of examples, the automated flow code is getting better because I'm documenting the manual flow. You can see some of the improvements here.

I'll leave you with a few F2 critical f requency plots a week apart from each other at the same transmit location. They were fairly easy to generate this morning.

3D globe visualization of the F2 critical frequency map with a green path line showing the LW2DO QSO from August 27, 2025, overlaid on color-coded F2 critical frequency tiles.
The LW2DO QSO 2025/08/27

One week earlier

F2 critical frequency globe view showing propagation conditions on August 20, 2025, with strong color variations from blue to red across the grid, highlighting changes in ionospheric density.
Exactly a Week Earlier


Hemisphere view of the hmF2 spire plot with colorful vertical bars radiating outward from the Earth’s surface, indicating ionospheric F2 layer height at the maximum electron density across North America on August 20, 2025
f2m From the Same Time

The side-by-side F2 critical frequency plots from US-4571 show just how valuable documentation and process refinement can be. A week apart, the maps reveal that the available F2 layer data didn't change much week over week even though the nature of the QSOs at the same time did. Mostl importanly, I didn't to spend much time finding this out. The act of documenting has made generating and comparing them much simpler. The tools are improving because my notes are improving—a reminder that careful documentation isn’t overhead, it’s a catalyst for progress.


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