Copasetic Flow

 I frequently find myself zooming in and out of QSO maps to see where the sun was with regard to my station's horizon  vs how far a given QSO propagated. I wanted a way to view maps without all the zooming. Now I have it! How I got It I've had Cesium maps on the blog for a while. Once I got the idea for a better way to view QSO maps, I deliberately executed on the habit I've been trying to build in myself:  I immediately asked GPT5 if it could augment my existing code. It turned out that it definitely could. In under half an hour, I had the new map view pictured above. You can steer around the maps at my POTA post .  The code for implementing map in map can be found in the csm-map-n-map repo.

 When the terrain's not as interesting, I like to use the OpenStreets view of Cesium to get a crisper look at how propagation changes with respect to grey line.  Making maps default to OpenStreets wasn't as easy as I would have liked to pull that off the first time I tried though. Here's the process for switching a map over to OpenStreets imagery right after it's created. Here's   an example of how to code this.  const czml = "";  const viewer = new Cesium.Viewer("cesiumContainer", { terrain: Cesium.Terrain.fromWorldTerrain(), }); var osm = new Cesium.OpenStreetMapImageryProvider({ url : 'https://tile.openstreetmap.org' }); viewer.imageryLayers.addImageryProvider(osm); viewer.scene.globe.enableLighting = true; const dataSourcePromise = Cesium.CzmlDataSource.load("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hcarter333/rm-rbn-history/refs/heads/main/maps/TouCansVerticalPierGround.czml"); viewer.dataSources.add(dataSour...

 This is so cool! I had a discussion a few nights back about what time of day Project TouCans had been spotted in New Zealand on 20 meters—the few times that its signal had reached out that far. We have a Datasette <add link> database of al the rigs QSOs and RBN spots, so it was simple enough to look up the answer. A few minutes after I started, I had a Google Earth Pro map of—kml file—of all the spots. Using the 'Show Sunlight' feature of app, I quickly realized that all of the spots had been at or near grey line. Here's the thing though, I wanted to animate how the sun's position on the horizon changed with each QSO, but... Every time I clicked on a new QSO, Google Earth Pro 'helpfully' moved the maps view camera to center the rather large QSO path on the map from space. Not. Helpful. <Add gif here> And this is where the kml concept of camera saved the day! I was able to add a camera tag to the kml file that pointed the map's camera at the ex...

 Just a brief post about our recent Organ Mountains K-4551 POTA. The outing was a blast! KO6BTY and I had to go to New Mexico to pick up our Christmas Tamales last weekend. On the way we worked both Cibola National Forest K-4514 and Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument K-4551 . And! at the Organ Mountains, Project TouCans made a QSO with SM2SUM in Sweden on 5 Watts! There was a really cool thing about the grey line as well! That's documented in the video below. Oh! And one last note! There was Aurora flutter on the CW signal from Sweden! So Cool! Here are the propagation maps with 10 QSOs at Cibola National Forest and 32 QSOs at Organ Mountains . 10 QSOs from Cibola National Forest K-4514 32 QSOs from Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument K-4551

 Project TouCans made it to New Zealand at such high levels that it was kinda not believable for a rig that runs 5 Watts. But then, I noticed that W6CSN who was doing a POTA at the Presido just North of me. He was booming into New Zealand even louder! I didn't manage to make a QSO down there this morning, although I did have too really nice QSOs with AZ and WA! It's nice to know the gray line is doing just what everyone says it should! And about an hour later, look what happened: Our gray line had reached New Zealand and turned everything around.