Copasetic Flow

 This project has been going on for a while, but remember, the point of the elevation profile project was to add the elevation profile between our ham radio—Project TouCans—and the receiving station at the other end of a QSO to the map of the QSO itself. This week, I finally got to start work on the maps themselves, and I've found a few things. First, an image added to a Placemark description without a  width="100%" tag will overflow the pane that Google Earth Web creates for the Placemark A user can scroll the chart horizontally, but theOh  information isn't all visible at once. Adding the width tag back in fixes the issue on Google Earth Web, but leaves Google Earth Pro with a very small chart I thought a good compromise between the two might be to house the image in its own div. For Google Earth Web we get but on Google Earth Pro we still get the tiny chart: It seems the only way to get this done will be to learn the new Google Earth kml 'Carousel' extensio...

 I've outlined the work on the ham radio QSO Google Maps Elevation API Datasette Enrichment  (try saying that 3 times fast) over the last several days.  What I haven't talked about much, but thought about pretty often is what the released elevation enrichment should do. Here goes. The Datasette enrichment will store the JSON data returned from the Elevation format in a database column named 'elevation'. Remember, the enrichment is taking two coordinate pairs that form a QSO like the brown line shown between Villa Nueva, NM and Idaho (KJ7DT's QTH). It then determines the endpoint of a line that only covers the first 200 meters of that path, shown as the blue line below: (Yes, 8 year-old Tawnse and I were sitting on the side of the 'cliff' on the other side of the Pecos River from the campground during that QSO. Yes, Tawnse does have a lower center of gravity than I do and led me up that path. Yes, I did have a heck of a time getting back down once I turned ...

 The project to add elevation profiles to each ham radio QSO on a QSO map is moving along. I've started to prototype inserting elevation charts into the map—via kml—of elevation profiles per QSO today. I had a slight bit of consternation that the charts might not be visible at all after coming across a post on stackoverflow that indicated text encoded images cannot be used as icons in kml files for Google Earth. I am happy to report however, that text encoded images in description fields for kml Placemark tabs work great! A tag like: <Placemark> <name>kj7dt </name> .............. <description> <![CDATA[<div width="400px"<h1>kj7dt </h1>Date/Time GMT: <div><br></div>"2023-02-12T21:58:00"<div><br></div><div><img width="100%" src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAoAAAAH.............. .......FTkSuQmCC"></div></div>]]></descr...

 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...

 A few days back I reported that I'd lost the ability to rotate and tilt on Google Earth Web. I filed a ticket with support. A forum member answered me in short order. It took a few back and forths for us to get used to talking about which controls were which, but there's still a way to rotate and tilt even though the controls went away. The key is to use the middle mouse button. From the response to the support issue: Can tilt/rotate, by holding the 'middle' mouse button, and dragging. Usually the mouse wheel itself.  Can also hold down Shift then up/down arrow to tilt. Left/Right to rotate.  If you'd like a fun map to try out the tilt and rotate controls with, check out this F2 skip map from the first Project TouCans POTA at K-0649. (You'll need to download it, and then load it into Google Earth Web or Pro since Google Earth Web doesn't support map sharing yet.)  

  Google Earth Web does not import kml files that it did before its recent upgrade. These same files are accepted by MyMaps. A workaround does exist which is to import the KML file to MyMaps, and then from the MyMaps UI view the map in Google Earth. The map appears correctly, and thereafter is incorporated into the user's Google Earth instance. I filed an issue on this. Using this ham radio KML map file, here's the workaround: First, import the map into MyMaps. That still works . Then, using the 'View in Google Earth' menus selection You can successfully import the KML file into Google Earth:

 I filed my first issue on the Google Earth Forum today. In the new version, the controls that enable the gang and I to tilt the map to look at HF propagation around land forms are missing. Hopefully they'll come back, or I'll learn where they've been hidden.

I found a workaround for providing links to Google Earth web maps. Up until this morning, to share a map with you like the following from Google Earth: I would have had to point you at the associated kml file on Google Drive, and then instructed you to open it by clicking on the 'Projects' menu in Google Earth, then clicking on the 'New Project' button, selecting 'Import KML from Google Drive', and then pointing it at the kml I mentioned above. So, instead, I just linked—embedded actually—shared QSO maps from Google's almosot forgotten—in some circles—but still very functional MyMaps site. Here's the map on MyMaps: Today while I was looking at a map to embed for  my Mt. Davidson SOTA earlier this week, I noticed that there's a link to view the map in Google Earth. I clicked it, and sure enough, the map appeared in Google Earth. I then copied the resulting, final, link into an icognito window, and got back a Google Earth map of the same area, b...

 How many apparent callsigns can one little ham radio bear? Google Earth on the web has a URL API of sorts, but apparently NO animation! Grrr..... Google Earth's URL stores the initial view of the map like so https://earth.google.com/web/@37.78472548,-122.50134987,111.08460648a,1238.99361831d,35y,-168.52095559h,74.50108975t,0r It may come in hand for doing something involving GUI screen scraping and unit testing  in future projects with the Rockmite ham radio. There's a new callsign in town for the little KD0FNR Rockmite. It's KD0R. So far, I have no  idea how this alias is coming about. Google Earth (at least on the web) doesn't support animation at the moment as far as I can tell. (Sigh, I'm stuck in kepler.gl for that feature for the moment.) Google Earth Studio will apparently support animation though? I hope to find out. For reference, kepler.gl is a nice platform, but I'm more used to working with kml files from back in the day when I had apps tracki...