(Note: This is a total ham radio geek-out entry, so if such things make your eyes glaze over, be advised that there’s an extreme glaze warning in effect until at least tomorrow morning.)
Anyway. I stumbled on a band opening yesterday by accident: I scanned the 6 meter band, expecting its usual near-silence, and instead heard something like a continuous pileup from 50.2 up to 50.6. Such openings happen semiregularly, especially in the summer and during sunspot maxima, but they’re not reliably present when you want them. Typically, people either monitor the bands for openings using a panadaptor (a way to visualize the whole band at once, often built into high-end radios) or they hear about it from their friends via Skype or some other chat system. (Hey Jeff! 6 is going batshit nuts!)
While copying my notesheet to my log last night, I thought of a better way. Suppose there were a sophisticated Web app allowing people to record their contacts in a central database off in the cloud somewhere. Serious contesters work their radios with both hands on a keyboard these days anyway, but they’re logging their contacts locally, on their own PCs. If enough people were logging enough contacts online in realtime, you could plot those contacts on a map as great-circle lines between one station and another. If you wanted, you could age the plots, so that a given line was displayed on the map for a selectable period of time, say the past fifteen minutes. Older plots would vanish and new ones would be continually added. What you’d have is a lookback time window onto what’s happening on the ham bands, plotted geographically. If you click on the “6 Meters” map and alluva sudden there’s a thick web of lines between Colorado and the east coast, you’d know that there’s a band opening underway.
This would be possible in part because the geographical coordinate locations of stations are implicit in logged contacts. Base (at home) stations are licensed by the FCC to particular addresses, and these addresses are matters of public record, easily queried by software. Mobile stations aren’t required to be at any particular location, but GPS logging for mobiles is possible, and I think has been done, if not commercially. Plus, there’s another way: More and more people (especially on higher bands like 6 meters) log the “grid squares” of the stations that they’ve worked. There’s a system for tagging 2 degree by 1 degree rectangles of the Earth’s surface, such that each rectangle has a 4-character callout. (There are an additional two characters of precision that almost no one uses.) My own is DM78. Here’s a map for the US and for the Earth as a whole. Plotting a line between DM78 and EM94 isn’t hugely precise, but it will tell you that radio signals are propagating usefully between central Colorado and northern South Carolina, and that’s all most of us need to know to make us scramble downstairs and turn the radio on.
I think this is one case where doing something out in the cloud that was previously done locally provides benefits that local storage alone does not. The whole point is to brag about how many locations you’ve worked worldwide, so privacy is not an issue. (If it is, just keep your logs local.) And the benefit of online collaboration is knowing just what propagation paths are open at any given moment of the day. I’d pay a quarter for that, or at least provide data by logging contacts.
I looked around just now to see how close we are, and whereas there are a couple of online logging systems in operation, they are nothing even close to realtime, and none that I can see makes any attempt to plot propagation paths for logged QSOs. That said, nothing I call out here is rocket science.
So. Did I miss something somewhere? And if not, what Ajax wizard is going to give this a try?
I was just reading to Sabrina yesterday from an ARRL solar update that made mention of a great deal of sporadic-E activity recently.
Some of what you describe sounds a lot like what we deal with at Dash for emergency number provisioning, including geocoding of addresses to coordinates and matching those against spatial data. We don’t do any graph-drawing, though.
On thing that might be helpful in a project like this is PostGIS, an extension to the PostgreSQL database server that supports geographic objects.
The problem of authentication would have to be overcome, so I think the ARRL would probably be in the best position to pull something like this off, given the authentication required for their Logbook of the World program –
http://www.arrl.org/logbook-of-the-world
I know there are logging programs that auto upload to LotW in real time. The problem would be pinpointing the location of the other end of the qso if that op was not using LotW. maybe grid square data could be harvested from qrz.com… I don’t know.
Rich
One approach would be to listen for the several dozen 6 meter beacons in the US. See map at http://www.k9mu.com/map/
Almost all the 6 meter beacons are between 50.0 and 50.1 MHz and could be simultaneously received and displayed with an inexpensive SoftRock type receiver with computer sound card and suitable software. At the moment there are several programs available, including some that decode multiple CW streams.
A 6 meter downconverter might be necessary depending on the progress of the 6 meter version of the Softrock; it’s something I haven’t looked at recently.
If a few dozen of these receiver sites were operational and linked via the Internet, it should be possible to provide an essentially instantaneous view of 6 meter propagation.
As they say, ‘it’s just some software. How difficult can that be?’
Jack K8ZOA
I read up on the SoftRock a year or two ago, but my impression was that the parts used would not run past 10M, and not well even there. I didn’t see anything online just now about a 6M version, but I’d buy one if it existed. My only hesitation would be building something that used SMTs–I’ve done enough of that to know I don’t enjoy it much. That said, having an SDR plugged into the system here would be good fun and on my “maybe someday” list for years’n’years. I may go high and buy one of the bigger, assembled and tested units.
The cheapest ($20) Softrock kit has all parts for any single band – 160m, 80m, 40m, 30m or 20m. The more expensive receiver kit can be built for a wider range of frequencies, but still stops at 30 MHz.
At one point, there was a Softrock usable at 6 meters, albeit with reduced sensitivity. That isn’t shown in the current list of available Softrock kits at http://kb9yig.com/
Perhaps the easiest way to get a Softrock running on 6 meters would be with a 6 meter down converter such as the inexpensive 6 meter – 40 meter kit from Kangus. It’s $36, so for a total of $56 you could have a Softrock working on 6 meters with good sensitivity. You supply enclosure, connectors, etc. http://www.kangaus.com/6m_converter.htm
I would not be afraid of surface mount work, at least at the scale of these projects. Some of the kits I design and sell are surface mount and the return rate for failure to work or other repair is, to date, zero out of several hundred.
You need a few tools, probably already in your workshop. One is a decent soldering station with a small tip. Another is 0.015″ diameter solder. Radio Shack, of all places, sells an excellent 2% silver bearing solder in this diameter in inexpensive 1.5 ounce rolls. A magnifier, either one of the illuminated magnifying glass style or the headband Optivisor is essential at our ages (I’m a few years older than you at 63). A pair of angled forceps/tweezers is necessary and that’s about it. I’m at the point where it faster to build a surface mount board than a similar through-hole board. Solderwick is also good to have on hand to remove inadvertent bridges.
Jack K8ZOA
Jeff,
Have you looked into DX packet clusters? I don’t know if they exist for 6 meters, but I’ve seen guys use them on HF quite a bit. It sounds like what you’re talking about: “Hey, I’m in EM10 and I just contacted a station in JN18 on 14230 MHz.”
That would be 14.230 MHz, ya know.
Hi Jeff,
The DX Sherlock 2.0 app that provides general propagation data and maps of HF, VHF, and UHF activity. Gabriel, EA6VQ, maintains the a ham radio site as a free service to Amateur Radio operators worldwide.
http://www.vhfdx.info
I have used the site primarily for six meter DXing activity and some UHF work, but this latest version expands the band coverage to HF as well. When a band is really hot, the display gives the impression of Missile Command in full attack mode.
Cheers and beers,
“Gus” (in the ham radio context)