Online Map Creation using AZ_PROJ v1.1.7

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

This site is provided by Mark, WM7D in Reno, NV, USA. Joe last wasted time on this page on 21-Dec-2011, last server code upgrade 05-Apr-2011, running AZ_PROJ v1.1.7 21-Dec-2011 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: Dec 2011: DXCC label problems fixed: Thanks to David G8SQH who sent me code fixes. The problems were 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. 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. 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). 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.

What's on the AZ_PROJ website

	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
	history of az_proj

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• maps with lat=±90° crash the map generator. This really isn't a bug as there is no azimuthal equidistant map from these locations - all points are south or north. However people often try to make this map - it's only natural to wonder what the world looks like from the north and south pole. What they probably want is a map like the U.N. logo. I could do this, but I haven't got around to it yet.

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

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

About the Azimuthal Equidistant Map Server

The server code is written in Perl. AZ_PROJ is written in Postscript. 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

e-mail

Joseph Mack NA3T (C) 1995-2011