AZ_PROJ History v1.1.7 Dec 2011 DXCC code fixed, thanks to David G8SQH who sent me the patches. The problems were o the labels for each DXCC country were plotted with the -ve of the bearing. So if a country was to your NE, the label was displayed to the NW. Goodness knows how long this has been going on. o the labels were displayed red/green. This has been changed to black. If you want something else, you can change it in your own downloaded version of az_proj. If enough people want the version on the wm7d server here changed to another color, let me know. o the labels were on top of each other around the perimeter of the map. David changed this to make each label a different distance according to the first letter of the prefix. So countries with the prefix '0' are right at the perimeter, while the prefix 'Z' is further out. Now you can read more of the labels, but some of them will have moved off the edge of your map (those countries to your E and to your W in portrait mode). v1.1.6 Dec 2010: Thanks to David VE7NDE, the border between North West Territories and Nunavut in Canada has been added and the border between the US states MO/AR has been restored. Fixed TV stations so that names of multiple stations at the same site would be listed under each other (thanks to W1QA for prompting this). Added US counties. Thanks to the people at the US Census for help here and to Pete KS4XG of PVRCNC for prompting this. n_amer.wdb v1.07 9 Jun 00. Made L. Ontario into closed loop. v1.1.4 5 Jun 00 bug fix, not all *.dat files were being read correctly. v1.1.3 Jun 00 - allow input of lat/lon in any of the following formats lat:lon lat,lon gridlocator gridlocators are changed to uppercase, and NSEWnsew suffixes on lat/lon can be used instead of +/- signs. Only decimal lat/lon is allowed. thus these lines are all equivalent qra:50:NA3T qra 6m:FM05lw:comment qra:50:NA3T qra 6m:FM05LW:comment qra:50:NA3T qra 6m:35.94N,79.03W:comment qra:50:NA3T qra 6m:35.94n:-79.03:comment qra:50:NA3T qra 6m:35.94,-79.03:comment This has been implemented for qth,city,AM/BC/TV/FM,rover,mountain,repeater,beacon,label,annotation This has not been implemented for anything that has a 4char gridsquare to indicate an area (eg to be filled) (this includes worked grids, qso...) v1.1.2 May 00 - (code not released) added extra positions (eg below-right) for station_strings identifiers for repeaters and other transmitters. Added a dictionary so that multiple transmitters at one spot (read commercial TV stations) will have their station identifiers (callsign/channel/freq) printed as a list below the station symbol, rather than on top of each other. (Thanks to W1QA and VE2DC for suggestion). (Code demo only - not finished till v1.1.3) strings from these will not overwrite, but will be stacked according to the symbol_string_locations in az_ini.ps for each symbol. Thus if 5TV stations and a beacon are plotted (in that order) all at the same location then 5 consecutive TV station symbols will overwrite each other, but the identifying strings will be stacked below each other. Next the beacon symbol will be drawn at the location and the beacon strings will be drawn as if 5 beacons had just been plotted. This has been implemented for AM/BC/TV/FM,rover,mountain,repeater,beacon,label This has not been implemented for annotation,city or anything that has a 4char gridsquare to indicate an area (eg to be filled) (this includes worked grids, qso...) v1.1.1 Apr 00 - population centers. Code on website, but source code not released. v1.1 Mar 00 beta11: fixed logic for compasses and distances_circles, so that can turn both off with /distance_circles (none) def , rather than having to turn both off separately. added /ignore_bands so that can plot etopo5 and qra-density filled grids, no matter what band is chosen for plotting (these data types have a frequency parameter in the line, so that you can select data by freq). changed "qra_density" to "density" in all files beta10: added elevation data 5min resolution beta9: changed to unix carriage control (saves me rebooting into DOS) also bug fix for beta8, images for different papersize (A3,4,5, halfletter,letter,ledger) are now rendered in a box of the correct size in the webpage (the file you downloaded was the correct size). can now turn off political states (eg states in USA, Australia; provinces in Canada). The MO-AR state border in USA has been returned after and absence of 18-30 months. There are some bugs that are a bit hard to track down. If I make a map from my QTH (FM05lw) on a Linux 2.0.36/libc5 machine, at a scale of 2250km/cm, plotting only eurasia and oceania (in any order), then gs261 will crash. If I change any of these (move my QTH by a few 100m, change the scale to 2251km/cm, use another version of gs, or run the program on a Linux 2.2.x/glibc-2.1 machine), then everything is fine. I would expect there will be other anomolies to be found. beta8: draws maps from the antipodes, with the local continent superimposed on the antipodes (special request of w3ep). The local continent is drawn by a .pod file (eg n_amer.pod, a file derived from n_amer.wdb file, by adding 180 deg to the longitude and inverting the latitude - only the country borders are included). beta7: Draws new borders in Europe (new from ca. 1990). Print files can be e-mailed to you (webpage server code). beta6: Plots density of 6m operators/gridsquare. Border between E- and W-Germany removed (by popular request) (Bosnia etc to be fixed later). Border between California and Nevada restored (for the 2nd time). beta5: Can use gridlocator or lat/lon to descibe location. Fixed bug in routine that places a "+" at center of map. Added call areas for VE,VK,ZL. Bit-rot fixed in rover and mountain routines. beta4: Added MF/LF beacons and 6m QRA list. Fixed bug in distance circle labelling routine. beta3: Bug fix in greyline code that gave sunset/rise lines for 12 days later. A cross has been added at the QTH, for people who don't include a compass. beta2: An option to _not_ plot high resolution data for maps covering large areas of the earth. This speeds up large scale maps by a factor of 2. beta1: minor upgrade from v1.04 allowing plotting of city names on the map. This is to help decorate small scale maps (for UHF users) in areas with little ohter information (coast lines, rivers or lakes). I did this after spending a a weekend on top of a mountain in EM85 operating on 432 and 1296MHz with a very boring map that had only gridsquares on it. Changed name of next version 1.1 rather than 1.05, to make name more compatible with DOS8.3 filenames. (Feb 00, I've lost track of what I did and when here). Somewhere in the 1.1beta series I did Can use gridlocator or lat/lon to descibe location. Added call areas for VE,VK,ZL. MF/LF beacons 6m QRA list (call signs of 6m operators by gridsquare - this is not particularly useful as the QTH is described by only the 4char gridlocator and all the operators in the gridsquare have their call sign plotted on top of each other. Now if they used their 6char grid locator, then each operator would have his own dot). Density of operators,contacts/gridsquare (for 6m qra list and for contents logs). Enable plotting of the density of US hams. This required plotting of a box from a 6char gridlocator. Fixed broken code for various grid: dat files v1.04 Nov 96 1. Orthographic orientation option (South at the top of the page). Needed for people in the Southern Hemisphere (-: 2. ARRL grid square labelling style added. The ARRL style has much smaller labels for the grid squares and puts the letter square labels in the bottom left of the square. The grid square labelling style used in v1.00-v1.03 is now called az_proj style. 3. Several different options added for shading worked grid squares (different colors, different cross hatching methods) so that it's possible to mark grid squares worked by two (or more) different people. See the sample grid.dat file for more info. You can also use the same options for marking the grids at the ends of a qso (see qso.dat for examples). Only one type of grid data line now used. 4. Plotting broadcast stations. A list of USA (and some Mexican and Canadian stations) stations (MW, FM, TV) in machine readable format has been produced by Colin K4SSO (aa0yt (at) mo (dot) net, http://walden.mo.net/~aa0yt). Further lists are expected (e.g. Australia). A separate file consisting of only the North American Channel 2 stations (55.25MHz useful as 6m propagation markers) has been added. A list of European TV stations (from Geoff Brown and Emil W3EP) has been converted to machine readable format, for 6m propagation markers. 5. DAT file formats are still changing (sorry). Anything which is a transmitter (TV station, rover, beacon, repeater) all have the same format. The only thing which changes is the symbol displayed. Please note the changes detailed in each .DAT file (at most you will have to add an extra colon or two to your old files if you want to update them). 6. GRID.DAT file format of v1.03 (there called grid2) is now standard (now called grid: format). The old format from v1.00 has been dropped. 7. An install.bat file has been added to install AZ_PROJ and Ghoscript onto a DOS machine with a VGA or SVGA monitor. Sample batch files for testing both Ghostscript and AZ_PROJ are included. 8. Easier method for choosing when to draw grid square borders and compass (in az_ini.ps). (Also clearer explanation of what's happening, I hope). 9. Display of USA by call areas (0..9) rather than (or as well as) by states. 10. Labelling feature. The center of the line on which the label sits, is at the lat/lon (cf annotations where a blob is at the lat/lon). This feature can be used for labelling continents, countries... The size of the characters can be chosen differently for each entry, and the size chosen scales with the map scale. You can try this feature out, by labelling the US call areas with the file us_call.dat when the numbers 0..9 will be drawn in each call area. The borders of the call areas can be drawn by turning on /draw_USA_call_areas in az_ini.ps. 11. Can convert output from the contest logging program CT to AZ_PROJ format. v1.03 27 Aug 96 Fixed main bug in v1.0. Added features: 1. qso.dat file. Draws great circle route between two QTH's anywhere on earth. For plotting contacts during propagation openings (eg Es), to show center of Es cloud. 2. comment fields added to grid2.dat, qso.dat 3. .wdb files edited so that consecutive paths have different path descriptor numbers. Paths now have about 1000 points or less. THese modifications simplify the code which reads the .wdb files. 4. dxcc country names/callsigns can now be drawn around the circumference of the map 5. Greylines can be drawn for sunset and sunrise at your QTH for any date(s). 6. In the personal .dat files (mountain, rover, grid...) a comment field, ignored by az_proj, has been added. 7. Config files added. You can use a small preconfigured file to make a map, in which only a small number of options is ever changed. Thus you can have a config file for HF, or VHF (or each VHF band, with a different scale). For examples, see hf_conf.ps and vhf_conf.ps v1.01,1.02 Jun 96 - not publically released grid2.dat file: enables selecting worked grid squares by propagation mode (designed to supercede grid.dat file). Greyline routine improved so that the nightime part of the earth can be shaded. Map Server at http://www.xray.duke.edu:1080/ - Apr 96 Machine kindly provided by my work. A node that doesn't get much use, mine :-), is being used. V1.0 released Jul 95 Quickly found to have a bug when running in postscript mode (sending to printer, or using ghostscript feeding one big concatenated file). If a grid.dat file was sent to the printer before the .wdb files the printer would lock up. Funny that was working only a few weeks before ;-). Ran fine if using ghostscript with command line parameters V0.9a, 0.9b (beta) released at VHF conferences in Memphis TN, Jul 94, and Vernon CT, Aug 94, for non distribution. Joe Mack NA3T jmack (@) wm7d (dot) net and Michael Katzmann NV3Z, michaelk (at) ieee (dot) org Sept 98