Copasetic Flow

 Sometimes you need a 3-D visualization of data, and sometimes you don't. I just posted a page  with foF2, hmF2, and MUFD(3000km) map images. All the maps are updated to the latest available data when you open or refresh the page. Map values are available—via tooltips—by hovering your map over the portion of the map your interested in. These maps contain the same data displayed in the 3-D Cesium Ion map . Please let me know what you think. All constructive feedback is welcome!

 ChatGPT wrote a little more starter code for me to answer the question, could we simply make an image of the F2 maps? Here are the current 3D F2 maps . These are great for visualizing what the ionosphere F2 height actually looks like. The maps are, however, a little memory and processor heavy. I wondered if would be faster to load a simple image for a daily driver sort of F2 map. I asked ChatGPT for help, and while things took longer this time, the LLM still made quicker work of the project. Here is one of the early sample outputs. Notice that the map is still split into grids in the same manner as the Cesium map. The only remaining task was either to display a legend on the same web page, or to use tooltips! I chose tooltips. To implement tooltips, I needed an html <map> tag containing the FoF2 values at each grid location with FoF2 image. That wound up being a bit of a journey. My first idea was to simply crank out an entire html page in the GitHub repos and display it he...

 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.

 We got to camp a bit more in the middle of nowhere than we usually do while traveling across Utah last weekend. My partner found the Burr Trail Scenic Byway. I've looked for a route across southern Utah for the last several years, but had somehow missed this really nice, well-paved, little road. We camped at the foot of an East-facing cliff, and the QSO map for the POTA reflected that fact pretty nicely: Based on this overall map, I didn't think we could hit the West Coast because of this cliff face. Almost all of the QSOs and spots paid attention to that cliff face. And then, there was N0OI: How? How had the signal cleared the cliff and skipped out to Perris, CA? Using data from the Boulder, CO ionosonde , at the time Project TouCans was spotted in California, the F2 layer skip is modeled in the gif below. Note that it clears the mesa, (just barely.) The other skip off to the Southeast was headed to the Cayman Islands. All of the skewing around is to convince myself that the ...

 I got to play around with spherical trig last week under the guise of improving the accuracy of the model that KO6BTY's and my F2 skip maps utilize.  Today, I took the first steps towards formalizing the algorithm I modeled into a datasette plugin so we can use our kml plugin to create skip maps (I'll probably also add a configuration flag to turn skip mapping on and off.) Using datasette-haversine as a model, I created datasette-haversine-point-path . The new plugin allows users to specify three lat/lng pairs that define the enpoints of a QSO and the location of an ionosonde. Given this information, the newly defined sqlite method will return the shortest distance between the ionosonde and the QSO's propagation path along the Earth. (I still need to add the special case where the shortest distance to the path is in fact between the ionosonde and one of the endpoints. I'll talk about this in my next post.) I re-puprosed the test case from datasette-haversine as wel...

 When I get up to head to work, most mornings I check out the 20 m band conditions. I get up well before grey line, but every so often... The F2 drops in out of nowhere, or it just stayed from the day before. Today was one of those days! I saw that the maximum usable frequency was clocking in at 13.61 MHz, so I kicked off the keyer on Project TouCans as I staggered about the house waking up. A few minutes later, I was fairly certain I heard something over the rigs speaker. I keyed '?' but no one was there. The RBN, however, had lit up all the way to the East Coast! A few minutes later, using the SKCC Sked Page I'd made a QSO with N1FG in Hew Hampshire again! The contact lasted just long enough for the two of us to exchange SKCC numbers, and then the band started to shut back down on both ends. As a last little interesting piece of data (ephemera?) 10 minutes after our QSO, the RBN station at Stanford, W6YX which routinely measures 10 dB over what I assume is a ground wave ...

 What a nice afternoon! The F2 over San Francisco decided it was ready to go! Five QSOs from the house on 4 W in just a few hours. Project TouCans finally reached into Wyoming, a state we've been mysteriously up until now. Also? I talked with someone on an Elecraft KH1. I'd hear a lot about the rig this week. It was really cool to get to talk to one so soon! TouCans made five QSOs during the afternoon into the early evening. Here's a look at the QSO map .