Online Map Creation using AZ_PROJ v1.1.6

Joe NA3T (EME B,D) and Michael NV3Z (EME B,D)

2004 Jun 25 0200 UTC: we have a new server box thanks to Mark WM7D. Preliminary tests seem OK - but won't be surprised if we've missed something. Let me know if there's any probems - Joe NA3T - jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net

seasons animation This site is provided by Mark, WM7D in Reno, NV, USA.

Joe last wasted time on this page on 13-Feb-2007. Last Server Code Upgrade: 29-Jun-2005 Bookmark this page. (the URL of the fill-in forms could change). Running AZ_PROJ v1.1.6 Changelog

Fast Option: If you've been here before and know what to do, you can just go make a map using the short form or the long form

Latest News: Jun 2002. A new list of VHF Rover sites from N2MH in the long form.

dead links: May 2002. Fixed, removed dead links (whew, lots of them). I've been linking to the original site whenever I could rather than copying the photo/data here, to give the original site the appropriate credit. However useful items disappear all the time and webpages are gratuitously moved like they were items on grocery store shelves. Maybe I should just copy everything here just in case.

Spam:I'm being killed with spam. At least some of it is coming from spambots, programs which ignore the robots.txt file and scan webpages for e-mail addresses. I've removed all mailto: tags and changed e-mail addresses on the pages here to a spam protected format (eg foo (at) bar (dot) com). If you have my e-mail address in any links or pages, I would be glad if you'd change the format to a human-only readable format.

What's on the AZ_PROJ website

About AZ_PROJ


	What is AZ_PROJ?
	Sample maps Most Wanted Grid Project, example maps US Ham Population Maps to help Rovers and VHF DX-pedition people plan their contests/vacations. (The Spring Sprints results and the Jul 2000 aurora opening maps show where the active VHF hams really are.)
	make your own maps
	download source files

Presentations by NA3T

Analysis of the 15-16 Jul 2000 Aurora Opening in North America presented at the N.E.W.S. Conference, Enfield CT, 26 Aug 2000.
Analysis of the 1999 Spring Sprints presented at the Eastern VHF/UHF Society and North East Weak Signal (NEWS) Group Conference, Enfield CT, 27-29 August 1999.

Sites using AZ_PROJ

near real time 6m propagation/QSO maps using az_proj by Chris AA1VL.

for fun

a Tcl/tk Grid Square/Distance/Bearing Calculator
Ham Humor: North Carolina phonetics and FleaSpeak
Where are people centering their maps? (The idea for these maps comes from a site whose URL I've lost).
The QTH information from the 25,000 maps drawn from Oct 98 to Feb 00 was used to construct the aggregate map for the whole world and a close up of NA and Europe. Notable hot spots are the Galapagos Islands and Aruba (popular sites for DX-peditions). The eastern half of USA draws a disproportionate number of maps relative to the US ham population. The large number of maps centered on Kyrgyzstan, relative to the ham population, are probably by people in the US who don't know whether they are east or west of Greenwich. A spot in the ocean SW of Baja California is probably Pratas Is, BV9 by the same people.

Thoughts on restructuring and where ham radio could be going.

My 50 yr plan for ham radio (addendum Feb 00: the ARRL response).
AH0A's submission to the FCC

What we can learn from analysing contest logs.

Possible reasons to do this are to
- look for VHF propagation anomolies seen only when large number of people are on the air.
- document the expansion of hams into new bands
- determine the best grids for Rover and DX-peditions.
The ARRL's policy is to not release this information as it would enable less skilled hams to learn from contest winners. I am a past winner and I think this policy is not good for ham radio. Here is a log of my efforts to analyse the 40yrs of contest and VUCC data that we've paid our employees at the ARRL to collect for us.

Some historical perspectives on ham radio, including US licensing conditions.

US operator licensing requirements (Chapter 33 of the book The Art and Skill of Radio-Telegraphy by William G. Pierpont N0HFF. (thanks to N3QYE now WW4M)
Some US ham radio history, by W2XOY, originally on the now defunct Hudson Division website, http://www.hudson-loop.org/ is on the Wayback machine. Here's the timeline and the first 16 installments 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Supposedly 17,18 exist, but I haven't found them.
An image of the original What hath God Wraught message.

These links are dead. I'm looking for the original text.

http://www.radiolab.net/ab4rl/ AB4RL's page had a paragraph on restructuring. Even AB4RL doesn't have this article anymore. I've recovered most of the links from the Wayback machine.
http://www.knowcode.org/ KnowCode Int an argument for entry barriers to the ham license

Making a map here on the Server.

This server can generate a downloadable customised colored map using a subset of AZ_PROJ's features. Anything you can do here, you can do at home too (the server is running the same code). You can use the short form if you only want to change the scale and the location of the center of the map. Otherwise, you can fill out the long form to use all of the server's features (elevation, center offset, gridsquares, lat/lon lines, geographical features, greyline, compass, beacons/TV stations).

I'm looking for...

info to make maps of ham density by gridsquare (sample from NE USA). For USA I used the FCC list of hams/addresses with zipcode and the US Govt list of lat/lon for each zipcode. If you know where I can get equivalent information for other countries for free, (or anything else that might be usefull here) please let me know.

Bugs

Feb 01: looks like the border between WA and OR in USA has gone AWOL. No-one has complained. Will look for it sometime.

Color Problems If the nighttime part of the globe animations are gray, rather than lightblue, (or you have blank spaces in this sentence) then here's an explanation.

Other Online Map Resources

Roger Hedin SM3GSJ has a Microsoft windows based azimuthal equidistant mapping program for hams which uses the same wdb database for the geographical information as this server.

The GARP Server is another az-equidistant map server. It has altitude (and ocean depth) information.

Martin Weinelt maintains the Online Map Creation site, which produces online GIF maps in several projections. This site uses the public domain "Generic Mapping Tools" (GMT package) developed in conjunction with NOAA at the University of Hawaii.

A whole collection of maps is available at The University of Texas

8 Jan 98:AZ_PROJ is one of the first, if not THE first, ham radio web site to be Y2K compliant. (Does anyone remember Y2K? It was very important in case you've already forgotten the lessons we learned.)

Feb 2000: I was out of the country for Y2K. When I returned a week later, I found this exciting first AZ_PROJ map of the millenium drawn from the Gulf Coast at 000403am. If this is your map and you want to be celebrated as AZ_PROJ's ham of the millenium, please let us know. We made it through 1 Jan 2001 too, for those who change their oil at xx,001 rather than xx,000 miles/km.

About the Azimuthal Equidistant Map Server

The server code is written in Perl. AZ_PROJ is written in Postscript. The webpage works for Microsoft clients (May 97 - yes the html is different; Feb 2001 - I have no idea what MS is upto now). The animations of the globe(s) (viewable on netscape ver>= 2.02) were produced with gifmerge (Jul 2002, the link is dead). Small gifs (now converted to png) are from Spiderwoman's Collection of Icons and Images" . Here's our privacy policy.

How to contact us

This AZ_PROJ map server site is being kindly provided by Mark WM7D websupport (at) wm7d (dot) net who you can contact if the server machine appears to be having trouble.

About Joe NA3T

Other computer related articles/activities by Joe NA3T

I maintain the HOWTO for the Linux Virtual Server (LVS) project. The LVS code is a layer 4 (L4) switch which allows a bank of identical small servers to appear as a single large/fast server. With LVS, server cost scales linearly with capacity. Server capacity/throughput can expand incrementally as the business grows or can be increased for short time scale events by adding servers and removing them after the event. LVS is currently being used for web/e-commerce/database sites, webcaching, e-mail, and streaming audio.
A tutorial on the double entry accounting package gnucash
I'm the treasurer for the North Carolina System Administrator's Association. We have a monthly meeting which consists of food provided by sponsors, an exchange of news (conferences, jobs available, being sought) and a presentation on matters of interest to sysadmins. We give training sessions to local businesses on setting up and maintaining systems of computers.
I teach parallel programming (mpi, openmp, pthreads). Most of the people who are interested in parallel programming are doing weather/climate modelling or computational fluid dynamics on supercomputers or beowulfs. For my regular job I'm a senior systems engineer at a supercomputer center.
I have a consulting company, AustinTek LLC, which does programming and Sysadmin.