Copasetic Flow

 Anyone with a github account can capture their ham radio station reverse beacon network spots and map them over time using kepler.gl . I've been working from Simon Wilison's screen scraping examples to create animated maps of the Rockmite's reverse beacon network spots . I believe, (and hopefully I'm about to find out), that I've created enough documentation that others should be able to fork the project to create their own maps! So, before I show what can be done with the tool, if you're interested, please follow the instructions , and let me know how it goes! Also, if you can't follow the instructions, or something doesn't work, please file an issue on the project, and I'll get to work on addressing it. I'll cover this more in a future post, but here's something interesting I saw in the spotting data from the Rockmite leading into last night's NAQCC sprint .  Utah and Arizona are one of the Rockmite's usual strong spots, and ind...

 I was intrigued by Simon Wilison's posts about screen scraping data using github, so I got right to work on it with respect to tracking the Rockmite's antenna performance, and WOW! The map above was created using data from the new project so far. Screen Scraping via the Network Tab of the Chrome Browser Developer Tools Tab Using Simon's lightning talk , it was pretty easy to find the data I wanted from the RBN site.  Github Actions Again pulling from Simon's talk, I was pretty quickly able to create a github action that runs a few times an hour to collect all the calls spotted from ham radio call signs that fit the pattern "KD0*". It took me a large-ish bit of time to debug whether or not the curl command or the jq command used to process the data were having issue. (It was  the curl command. If  your URL has arguments following a '?' you'll need to enclose it in double quotes.) Now that I was pulling out the call data , the immediate next issue...