Copasetic Flow

 One of my goals this week is to add elevation profiles between QSO stations as a Datasette enrichment to our ham radio QSO Datasette utility. It's turning into a bit more of a convoluted project that I'd expected, so I'm taking the time to right down the first pass of the steps in the process. Here are the broad strokes: Complete a partial path Datasette plugin to find the coordinates of a small portion of the path between stations to use as the endpoint for an elevation profile path. This is already done . Use those coordinates as an input to a Datasette plugin that returns the elevation profile as json data. The first step of this has been prototyped . (It's looking like installing jq for Python on Windows is going to be a bit of an issue , so I'll find a different way to parse the returned json. I've done similar tasks with the ionosonde data and the rx station geocoding data. Produce charts as images for each row so that the query immediately presents a sum

 There's a running joke on  HamRadioWorkbench   about operating mobile from a riding mower. I'm proud to announce that through the wonder that is Project TouCans, WiFi, and Bluetooth, the team here at antigravkids is releasing their first QRP mower w/ ham radio prototype. Both the mower and the 20 meter rig are QRP :) Go ahead, take a listen. The prototype is enabled by the following technologies: Project TouCans Pico-W Enabled Keying Bluetooth Audio ala JBL Clip 3

 Having learned how to make timestamps again, I'd wound up with quite a lot of lines of template that didn't really do anything too, too awe inspiring. In short, I needed a twelve line block of kml to display a single digit of a time or a date. I decided the spiffy thing to do would be to move this kml template into a file that I'd include from the base kml map jinja template. It was more difficult than I originally thought it would be. Turns out that simply adding the include line did not do the trick. I got back the error message: no loader for this environment specified A little bit of research led to a solution. Jinja template objects in Python needs to have an Environment that is properly setup if you plan to include other templates from inside a template. That led to this line tmpl = Template(f.read()) changing to this line tmpl = Environment(loader=FileSystemLoader("./plugins/templates")).from_string(f.read()) At which point the template was located. Then,

 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 scre

This is moving kind of fast! Regarding the goal of automating elevations using Datasette and the Google Maps Elevation API. I pulled a QSO out of a hat last night and tried the coordinates between stations in a call to the Google Maps Elevation API.  The URL to use the API looked like this: https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/elevation/json?path=37.7248952%2C-122.4229361%7C37.7247294%2C-122.4207246&samples=200&key= where the path parameter contains two coordinates separated by %7C (html encoding for the pipe symbol: '|') and commas (aka %2C) define the coordinates of the tx station and the coordinate of a point 200 meters along the path to the rx station, and the samples parameter tells the API how many points to split the path into and return elevations for. It's all documented by Google here . I was quickly rewarded with data that looked like the following: { "results" : [ { "elevation" : 123.6165237426758, &quo

 Week notes are kinda cool. It's fun to see what happened the week before ,what was planned ahead, and then reflect on that. This week, sigh... Oh, the irony. Reviewing last weeks notes, I found an off-handed comment I made about working on improving audio performance by bringing all the audio wiring inside the rig. This, Did Not. Help. I did get to learn a lot about where the noise in the audio circuits is coming from, I did also invent a new patch that helped out with the Pico-W noise I was originally trying to eliminate. Reflection is pretty useful, actually :) It's not easy to see the charging light indicator on the Imuto supply when it's properly housed in its Progresso soup can... ahhh... battery pack enclosure! I worked out an audio process for ensuring the charging cables are indeed charging so I don't wake up with a non-functional radio. I spent a lot of time looking at and reading about the QMX! (I read about it at their site, on qrper.com , and on w6csn.b