2018-04-26
More radio maps and their limits
The PE4KH website has maps of the locations where I contacted radio amateurs all over the world. The maps with generated images are created by exporting my locators worked/confirmed from cqrlog and using gcmwin for linux with a whole set of different configurations to plot the results. But now the 2 meter band has been added and on that band a 'record distance' is not as far as on HF. On HF my current distance record was a contact with Australia at 16581 kilometers. My current distance record on the 2 meter band is 363 kilometer in Germany. Quite a different scale! So the maps part has been enhanced with a 2 meter contacts map, but gcmwin can't use 6-position maidenhead locators so the map is quite coarse compared to what I want. I don't know the solution at the moment to improve this. The recent qso map PE4KH does show the more precise gridsquares when available in the log, so maybe that page needs distances added. Update: The script that creates the recent qso map page has been updated to include distances. Which showed me that my largest distance on the 2 meter band was somewhat better than I first remembered!