KO6BTY and I attended office hours with Simon Willison yesterday.

Here's what you're seeing. There's an SQL query in our Datasette instance that grabs only the QSOs from our Cibola National Forest POTA back in March. That query resulted in 9 QSOs shown in the table. Our additional CZML (and now Cesium viewer) plugin creates a CZML map that is loaded into a Cesium Ion viewer at the bottom of the page.

I'm not releasing the code that loads up the viewer quite yet because I have to get the access token squirreled away and all that good stuff. Meanwhile the CZML plugin has been released for a few days now.

By the way, we need a way to pull adif files from POTA activations into Datasette. Keep an eye out :)

 A single path animation is up and running!

The animation can be seen here.

But wait! There's more! I now have a template that creates an entire animation:

Want to explore it on your own! Please do:

 This setting goals thing just might work. 

The day after I set the goal to find a new time icon solution for the animated kml QSO maps a solution appeared. I was studying (again) the new Google Charts API, hoping it might be similar enough to the old visualization API to provide a solution—it was not—when I looked at the new  map chart, more for the fun of it than for any other reason, and there it was: the answer I'd been looking for. Mind you, the answer was not in fact the chart API itself. The answer came in the form of map marker icons.

Allow me to give you a little background and/or catch you up. Google Earth Pro map animations are very cool. We use them to watch QSO frequency during POTA and SOTA activations, and have more than once used them to observe that our overseas QSO were in fact gray line QSOs. But, it's very difficult to see the tiny time indicator on the animation play controls.

That's OK though because there's a way to fix the issue. The kml screen overlay tag displays images on a map. Clearly, I just need an image that contains text designating each time of interest. With the deprecated chart API, this was a simple matter. The API returned PNG images intended to be displayed on web pages. I used the text bubble visualization specifically. It accepted an argument for the text it displayed. Simple. Then, it went away. (To be fair, the API has been 'deprecated' for a little over a decade.

So, I was back out on the streets looking for a way to get pictures of arbitrary timestamps from somewhere... anywhere really... on the web. Which leads us back to the new Google Charts API. For supported charts there's a getImageURI method that outputs raw PNG data representing the chart. (I'm going to use this method to display elevation charts, and therein lies the solution for displaying callsigns with the timestamps ala elevation chart titles... Anyway.) 

That solution wouldn't work for timestamps thought, and as of today, there are no charts whatsoever that just dump out text. So, seemingly no solutions there, but wait! As I was browsing through the map chart docs, I noticed an offhanded reference to an online icon warehouse that could be used for map pins. It was exactly what I needed! I only had to browse the icon catalog for a few minute to find what I was looking for: a collection of 48 pixel wide icons each displaying a single decimal digit. To display a single one of these digits, I can use a URL like this:

https://icons.iconarchive.com/icons/twitter/twemoji-alphabet/48/Number-0-icon.png

To display the time down to the minute in the kml jinja template I used four blocks like this one:

<ScreenOverlay>
<name>Map Time{{loop.index}}</name>
<Icon>
<href><![CDATA[https://icons.iconarchive.com/icons/twitter/twemoji-alphabet/48/Number-{{ map_minute.11 }}-icon.png]]></href>
</Icon>
<drawOrder>{{loop.index}}</drawOrder>
<overlayXY x="0" y="1" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
<screenXY x="0.10" y="0.1" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
<rotationXY x="0" y="0" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
<size x="0" y="0" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
<TimeStamp>{{ map_minute }}</TimeStamp>
</ScreenOverlay>

And voila! The time labels are back!

I’ve chased a few SOTA activators before, it’s quite a fun thing to do, you watch the spotting website and then see if you can get them. Once someone posts a spot it’s pretty quick for them to get a pile up. I’ve kept thinking about doing it, and I do live in an ideal place where there are plenty of summits to chose from. I’ve not been on the radio much this year and I ended up taking a day off today to drop off and pick up the kids from school, so I decided I should make the most of it and go up a mountain!

Using the great SOTA map website, Sotlas, I had a look around to see where I should go first. As I was doing the school run, I was limited on time to about 6 hours all in. I also thought I shouldn’t try too much on my first attempt, in both walking and radio setup. I noticed that some summits get bonus points during the winter (between about December and March), and one of those was near me so I thought that would be ideal. The place is called Bennachie, and one of its highest peaks is Oxen Craig. The peaks are call a ‘tap’. This is the summit GM/ES-061, which is worth two points and five in the winter.

As you can see from this photo taken by MM7MWL, it’s a beautiful view.

Gear

Radio-wise, I still have my Xiegu G90, which was my first radio, that is portable enough – certainly when compared to the Yaesu FTDX10! It’s got a bit of heft to it (2.5 kg ), but is 20W, has a great ATU and a nice waterfall.

For the antenna, I wanted to keep it as simple as possible and to make use of my carbon 6m mast. I found MM0EFI’s random wire suggestion and it looked ideal. This is 5.5m radiator, with two 4.25m counterpoises. They’re attached via bananaplugs to a BNC, then a short piece of coax with a common mode choke into the radio.

The battery situation isn’t ideal. I’m using an ultramax 18 Ah LiFePO4 battery, which has loads of capacity and much better than a lead acid or a LiPo one but it’s still around 2.5 kg. I use it when out in the garden, but have never had to carry it very far. I do have a few 18650 lithium cells which I’m meaning to make my own portable battery but I’ve not got round to it yet. So the ultramax had to do.

I also brought my Boafeng 2m/70cm radio to try some 2m FM. I have a Kenwood TH-D72, which I thought of bringing for APRS, but it’s too complex for my liking. Plus I could’ve just used my phone for APRS if I really wanted to.

All in, with lunch and water, my backpack was over 6 kg. Fine, but plenty of room for optimisation next time.

The Activation

With the kids dropped off at school, and backpack packed, I set off about 0915 to drive to the car park behind the summit.

I wasn’t sure how long everything was going to take, so I opted to find the shortest and most direct route to the summit. There are quite a few walks you can do in the area via various taps and approach from different sides, but starting at the “back” looked the quickest. It was basically a straight up.

I had looked at doing two activations in one trip, as Millstone Hill, GM/ES-077, isn’t that far away. However, when I worked out a couple of routes they were 4-5 hours of walking and I decided that was trying to do too much in one day.

I paid my parking at 0953, and was being blown away on the summit by 1040, which was a bit quicker than the 1:08 hrs OSMaps suggested it would take to walk up. I was pretty hot and sweaty by the time I got to the top, and had taken off my hat, but once exposed in the wind, I was glad to have it.

It was quite nice weather on the way up, I could see the summits were under cloud cover, and when I reached the top the wind was howling and the air was very cold.

I looked around for a nice place to setup, and ate my sandwich. Another guy came up and we said hello. I tried a few calls on 145.500 MHz, but I think I would’ve needed to organise this ahead of time with the locals. I found a nice outcrop to shelter behind that was in front of the summit, and setup the pole and radio on a rock. I had a little nook to crouch in and there I started to see if I could make any contacts.

I started on 40m, had a listen to 10m, but it seemed dead, then moved to 15m and then finally 20m. I managed 37 contacts, with 14 countries, two summit to summit QSOs, and one parks on the air contact. My furthest contact was with Z36T in The Republic of North Macedonia at 1501 miles.

I’d been on the air 50 minutes and my logging hand was getting cold! Plus I was getting stiff in my funny crouching position, and concious of getting back in time to pick up the kids. I was using Cloudlogoffline app to log, which is handy as it can then sync to my cloudlog database but I don’t like that it doesn’t keep the frequency from the previous QSO as the default entry. [update: you can under the settings, so set it there before starting to add QSOs.] It’s also fiddly to add another SOTA reference due to the iOS keyboard coming up when you select an input box and not being able to scroll. I might just do ‘Fast Log Entry’ (FLE) next time in an Apple note file. I’ll see what else there is too. VK port-a-log seems to be a favourite for SOTA but it’s Android only.

I was back in time for a nice cup of tea and sit down before it was school pick up. I look forward to the next one. It’s fun being the DX!

Donderdag 18 januari de vierde sessie alweer van de CWops CW Academy, Intermediate Class. Voor deze week heb ik erg mijn best gedaan om de code groepen op lcwo.net onder de knie te krijgen. Enkele karakters head copy lukt uiteraard en groepjes van twee, maximaal 3 ook wel. Maar bij 4 of 5 lukt het gewoon heel slecht en dan gaat het alleen om cijfers of letters op een snelheid van 25wpm / 13wpm effectief (Farnsworth spacing). Gecombineerd met alle tekens (Koch methode) gaat nog vele malen slechter. Daniel M0SDB adviseerde ooit al eens dat woorden en korte zinnen (short sentences) een betere manier was om uiteindelijk ook echt woorden te horen in plaats van alleen de karakters.

Advisor Bruce K9OZ gaf deze donderdag ook aan om de woorden en zinnen te doen in plaats van random karakters. Om dezelfde reden. Dus daar ga ik komende week mee bezig. Random karakters is wél goed voor Callsign training, want dat is ook een groep met cijfers, nummers en de / . Woorden en korte tekst deed ik ook al wel tijdens de Fundamental Class omdat het toen in de lesstof stond. Nu dus weer oppakken. Voor Roy KI0ER werkt het heel goed om alles in je hoofd te visualiseren, dus letterlijk de letters voor je te zien. Michael WA0SPG moet juist de ogen dicht doen om te kunnen focussen. Ik doe een beetje van hetzelfde. Ik zet de leesbril op zodat ik mij niet kan laten afleiden van de omgeving hahaha…..

Wat ik nog steeds lastig vind is het snel kunnen nemen van een Short Story uit de lesstof op 13wpm. Een QSO gaat best goed. Bruce vertelde dat hij het zelf ook lastiger vond om iets op die, voor hem lage, snelheid te nemen. Hij adviseerde om de korte verhaaltjes op 18 woorden per minuut te doen. Desnoods op 15 wpm. Dit ga ik uiteraard proberen…. ik ben bang dat het alleen niet heel veel gaat brengen.

Na dit besproken te hebben zijn we weer 4-letterwoorden gaan seinen naar elkaar. Leuk om te zien dat het bij iedereen steeds beter en makkelijker gaat. Nu dus ook ruim 30 minuten hiermee bezig geweest. Bruce gaat ons voor de volgende keer een lijst sturen met 6-letterwoorden. Niet 5 want er moet een uitdaging blijven zegt Bruce.

Het huiswerk voor een sessie bestaat uit drie dagen. Elke dag met 2 opdrachten. Een kort verhaaltje en QSO luisteren (gesimuleerde verbinding tussen twee zendamateurs) en een ronde met Morse Runner, woorden en zinnen op lcwo en optioneel een volledige cyclus (ronde) met RufzXP. Elke oefendag begint met een opwarmoefening. Dit heb je echt nodig om morse in je hand en hoofd te activeren. Om mijzelf te monitoren en te zien dat ik ook echt alles goed sein tijdens het opwarmen, gebruik ik de audio decoder op morsecode.world, waarop ook veel oefentools staan. Deze werden tijdens de Fundamental Class gebruikt. Een heel handige en zinvolle website.

Ga verder naar: De voorbereiding vijfde sessie

Volg hier mijn CWops CW Academy missie

Of Lees hier hoe het allemaal begon met CW

Het bericht Vierde Sessie CW Academy Intermediate verscheen eerst op PE2V.

If you’ve been paying any attention you would know propagation on 10m has been exceptional this past week or so. Given my shack relocation, I’ve been missing out on it…until today!

I had some time around lunchtime and when I looked at the maximum usable frequency on this site, I was amazed to see the whole of the UK (including Scotland!) was around 40!

Needless to say, I could hear all over the world, and they could hear me too.

Several new DX locations for me today: China, Taiwan, Columbia, Azerbaijan, United Arab Emirates, plus some other good locations like South Africa. Later on the evening I tried 20m and got Cayman Islands, and Thailand.

Hopefully these new locations confirm the QSOs, and that’ll take me closer to the 100 DXCC milestone. I have now worked 100 DX entities in my log, but only 75 have confirmed via LOTW (although 87 via qrz.com).

For a little while, the Matrix Radio group have been talking about a HF net at some stage. I think I offered to do something, but have yet to do so! Steve, M0XVT, raised that he joins a 60m net and we all thought that sounded like a good idea to try. We’d agreed to join at 9pm on 5.3985 MHz. This would be my first attempts on the 60 m / 5 MHz band.

My HF antenna is a EFHW for 40m, and it’s not naturally resonant on 60m, but I suspected my Xiegu G90 would be able to tune it up as it’s pretty decent at matching anything to anything!

My only experience with the 5 MHz band is from my full licence exam. The UK band plan is probably the most complex band plan there is for amateur radio. It makes it ideal for writing exam questions! The amount of warnings about transmitting outside the band plan due to the other user of the frequecy, aka the military, does make for careful planning. The RSGB page has lots of info on it, but it’s not the sort of thing you just quickly tune to and call CQ or even respond to others.

The 60m net, 5.3985 MHz, is on Sunday mornings at 0700 UTC, but I’ve not joined in as I’m still between shacks.

I also learnt of the trick of using a WebSDR to listen to a net you’re in. Sometimes they can hear you but not vice-versa, and so at least this helps with the flow of the net. You can get some software to sync your SDR and rig (or write your own with NodeRed) but for a net, when you’re not moving about, manually setting is good enough.

Was on the computer doing things and switched tabs to YouTube and I saw Callum, M0XXT, of DXCommander, doing a live stream on 40m. Thought I might as well give him a call.

My antenna was unplugged, as it comes in through the window and now it’s getting chilly in the mornings, so I had to nip out to get that sorted. I don’t know why I was in a rush, he was on for hours, but always a chance he’d move on to 20m for EU/US stations. This meant I was still on 25 W from last time I used the radio for FT8 when I called him. Now, 25W to 100W is only 6 dB (notionally an S point), so in some respects not a big deal, but you never know and sometimes it can make a difference.

He heard me just fine, 56. I meant to tell him he was 59 but forgot with telling him my name and location – he gets a bit frustrated when people don’t tell him their name – and thought I’d say it on the next over, but I didn’t get one. Not that it mattered at all.

So now my QSO is immortalised by Google on YouTube.

Is this the radio equivalent of being behind a reporter on a live TV show? I don’t know, but a bit of fun anyway.

1. Work and Time: I've worked an odd schedule for the past half year, working from 1700 to 0130. As many hams are driving home, I'm driving to work. It doesn't give me much time to talk as most non-retired hams are in the middle of their work day when I'm just waking up. Plus while working I obviously I can't talk on my radio. 


2. Location: I live in Lynn, Massachusetts. Lynn has odd geography, it's flat near the ocean and the Saugus River, but other parts of the city are very hilly. I happen to live in the hilly section. The only problem, the slight hill I'm on is surrounded by taller hills, so in essence, I'm a valley. My club's main repeater is located in Danvers. Which while only separated by another city is about 10 miles. As VHF and UHF radio is line of sight, it has to traverse those hills to reach the repeater. I can receive the repeater just fine on my Yaesu VX-6R, but transmitting is another story. I've listened to myself via Echolink on the repeater and I've heard nothing but static on Echolink despite kerchunking the repeater with my Yaesu, and this is with an upgraded Diamond SRH320A as the antenna.


3. No Local Repater: Lynn has a couple repeaters according to the New England Repeater Directory, RFinder, RepeaterBook and even the New England Spectrum Management Council, the repeater coordinators themselves. There's only one problem, they're offline according to a couple of sources and have been since before I got my license. This would make it a lot more easier to talk since I'm right down the road from the repeater and would have no issues, that is unless.


4. Repeaters Are Dead: Some of the repeaters are just dead. D-E-A-D. Not all of them, but a good majority of the day, which plays into issue #1. Some are active, but again, they're usually active when I'm at work, or they're out of transmitting range.