Copasetic Flow

 I'm working on creating video clips of each QSO during a POTA/SOTA activation. I was inspired by K4SWL 's YouTube channel . Thomas records his entire activations without edits. For various reasons, my outings so far have required edits. I've been recording using my cell phone and a variety of things happen because of that. For example, I can't ignore incoming texts because I'm the 'guy in the chair' for three kids. I don't, however, need to publish those messages either, so for some clips, I need to crop the top of the phone screen away. That's where this ffmpeg post came in handy. To clip off the notifications in the top of the screen, I used ffmpeg -i serccrab.mp4 -ss 00:02:11 -t 00:01:14 -vf "crop=in_w:in_h*.80" -c:a copy ki6pxv_sh2.mp4 Where the extra argument  -vf "crop=in_w:in_h*.80" Clips off the top 20% of the screen. Here's the QSO. You'll hear the phone vibrate, but the message across the top of the screen isn...

This is the POTA activation that just keeps giving. Going through all the recordings of the blustery day POTA from US-0757, I wanted to make a few shorter clips. Consequently, I dusted off my nascent ffmpeg skills. One of the tings I had to find was how to make a video clip. Here's the command I'm using to divide my larger recordings into smaller ones: fmpeg -i us_0757_waves.mp4 -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:00:48 -c:v copy -c:a copy sm0gjn.mp4 The -i argument is the input recording. -ss denotes where in the recording in hh:mm:ss format I want the clip to start and the -t argument indicates in hh:mm:ss format how long I want the clip to last. The -c arguents are telling ffmpeg to copy both video (:v) and audio (:a). The copy argument says to copy these thingis for the duration of the clip into the file name copying the 'copy' argument, (cm0gjn), in this case. The clip procesing takes about two seconds, and for me anway, is so much faster than using any GUI video editing program I...

 This post and the next will detail plans for ideas inspired by K4SWL, Thomas Witherspoon, of qrper.com . Thomas records all of his POTA activations, and then posts them on YouTube like the one below. Meanwhile, Google Earth Web has introduced(?) the idea of carousels (maybe just new to me) in their KML styles. A carousel allows multiple media containers, (videos, hthml, pictures, etc.), to be attached to a placemark. The result is a placemark that looks like the following Here's the idea. What if a POTA video could be automatically split up into per QSO snippets using ffmpeg  and then automatically added to kml QSO maps like the one below? In that case, not only would you see the information in the marker above, but you'd be able to listen to the fluttering signal as it bounced of the aurora on its way to New Mexico! Heck, the map could even include and elevation profile per QSO . I think the technology exists already. The keyer for the Pico-W runs on Linux on a chromebook...

 I started out wondering how to attach videos to kml maps and wound up working on elevation profiles. There's always something new to learn on this project. It's pretty cool! There's something I've often wondered about with respect to QRP on twenty meters with low antennas: how much help is the rig getting from the slope of the hillsides I transmit from? Using Google Earth elevation profiles, It looks like I'll be able to get quantitative answers! The Goal Map the elevation profile of the terrain Project TouCans is situated on in the direction of the transmit path to the other station in a give QSO (radio contact.) The idea is to wind up with something like this. The Steps to Get it Done (First Prototype) Issue: The elevation profile from station to station tends to be very long. I'd like to only look at the profile over a few twenty meter wavelenghts. I don't see any zoom controls in Google Earth for the elevation pofile, so I'll plot a shorter line on...

Tracking down a mapping bug led me to watch clouds on Google Earth and after yesterday's snow storm—more on that later—I suddenly found myself scraping weather radar data to layer on top of the K-4514 POTA site KO6BTY camped at on Friday night. Here's the map of the POTA activation/camping trip that started on a clear evening, became a dusting of snow, and then became more snow than the rental car could handle: That's the camping site/radio station there at the pink x. The not quite beautifully formatted time in the upper left-hand corner is UTC time starting at midnight at the camp site. As you can see, the snow started, thought it might give up, and then resumed with gusto. I'll talk about that on my activation report. Here's the cool thing though! I've mostly automated the creation of radar weather maps for a given POTA activation site!  Here's how: The Source Data: I'm scraping nexrad data from this site. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/maps/radar/ I learn...