Copasetic Flow

When making our QSO skip maps one of the issues we encounter is that the lines from our station to the F2 layer don't always start right at the ground. This seems to be an artifact of CZML and the fact that the Earth is not a sphere, but rather an ellipsoid, and even then, there are all those hills and mountains. The initial QSOs can wind mapped as up coming from underground: or, they can wind up starting from above the surface of the Earth In any event, it's been necessary with each map to adjust the elevation height of our station. I've yet to find a parameter to set in a czml that makes the starting point always be on the ground. "clampToGround" works for polylines that are always on the ground, but not polylines whose next point has an altitude greater than zero as the ground station to F2 layer polylines do. I added a feature into the JavaScript mapping application this week that allows me to adjust the height of all of the QSO's starting points at...

 The radio is so quiet! I mentioned that I changed the configuration of Project TouCans so that my smart phone's hot spot serves as the centrial connection for TouCans and the computer(s) we use to control it.  Yesterday, at the Pony Express National Historic Trail, I only made a single POTA QSO on 20 meters with TouCans, but it was an unbelievably noise-free one: You can hear background noise in the real world—planes, waves, boats, people wandering by—from the camera. You can also hear some pretty gentle AM broadcast interference, but that's it! To give you an idea of how much things improved, listen to this QSO from before the change. The helicopter noise you hear in the video QSL below is from the Pico-W. The screehing noise also appears to have been from the Pico-W.

 Last week, I asked ChatGPT to create header maps per QSO from a CZML map of my POTA outing. It dumped out code that I had to fuss a little bit with, but that did the job admirably. The output is text-encode png images in the console of the Cesium Sandcastle window. I would then download those images by copying them into an html file, opening the html file in a browser, and downloading each of the images individually. That was cool, until... Last night, I made 51 QSOs at US-4571 in San Francisco. That's a lot of files to download individually, so I asked ChatGPT: Please write a JavaScript, do not use React, that can save all the images from web page locally. It responded with code that downloaded the first 10 images. I asked it for a fix That only downloaded the first ten. Please modify the code so that it downloads all the imags and uses .png as the default extension. and it produced a modified version of the code that handily downloaded all 50. See the d...

 I used ChatGPT to get a quick and dirty protoype for an application that would make a map of each individual QSO from a given CZML map I had already created. All in all, it took ChatGPT and I about 20 minutes to come up with a prototype of an application that takes one of my CZML POTA maps, walks through it QSO by QSO, creates a label on the map with embedded QSO information and then dumps out a text encoded PNG image of the QSO on an OpenStreets map. =======================draft notes, skip to next equals line till polished============== Here's my first question to ChatGPT: Can I write Javascript that positions and frames a Cesium Ion map based on data read in through a czml file? I quickly followed that up with  Please write a method to zoom to any polyline defined in the czml file. Zoom to each polyline, wait three seconds, and then zoom to the next polyline in the order they are defined in the file. Next, I asked for a single line at a time: Please modify the method...