Mapping Mike For Fun and Profit

I was footling about on one of the Moose servers with some Python and MySQL code and couldn’t get it to work properly. I knew there was a similar piece of code that I used to generate maps of chaser locations. So having got that working I was able to fix the bug in the new code. I hadn’t mapped anything for a long time and as I now had the mapper routines running I thought I’d update some maps.

Mike 2E0YYY is a good data source because he spends long enough on a summit to rack up a few QSOs and that helps generate more blobs on the map. So taking only Mike’s activations in March 2012 where he had more than 50 QSOs as the starting point I’ve generated some new maps. As before red markers are 2m-FM and blue markers are 2m-SSB. Green marker is the summit. For a marker to appear you had to be in the 2009 callbook and not “details witheld”. /M and /P contacts are not mapped. Hover on a marker to get the callsign.

http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/chaser_locations/YYY/wb-004.html
http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/chaser_locations/YYY/wb-005.html
http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/chaser_locations/YYY/nw-031.html
http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/chaser_locations/YYY/nw-044.html
http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/chaser_locations/YYY/sp-004.html
http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/chaser_locations/YYY/sp-013.html
http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/chaser_locations/YYY/sp-015.html

What does it mean? Well it probably says something about the take off from these summits. The one which is most interesting to me is for nw-031. It’s got the chaser pattern I’d have expected. But I’d not have expected the Ynys Mon QSOs, probably some knife edge diffraction over Snowdon or the Glyders.

Andy
MM0FMF

In reply to MM0FMF:
Andy,

There is presumably a reason for not mapping the /P contacts; this seems a pity because including them would alter the shape of the distribution for nw-031. Vicki and I both had QSOs with Mike from more than one summit in mid-Wales on his recent activation (and also from some SP summits when he was on Shining Tor). For /P you would not need the operator to be included in the call book because their home QTH would be irrelevant.
73,
Rod

In reply to M0JLA:

There is presumably a reason for not mapping the /P contacts

Yes, I don’t know where the /P contacts are!

Probably the /P will be a SOTA activator, probably. The data is derived, obviously, from the SOTA database and that basically says was on on and worked on . So it’s easy to find in this case, every chaser who worked Mike on NW-031. That’s extendable to find every chaser who worked him on 2m-FM. Easy peasy.

The call sign is then looked up from the 2009 call book and from there I convert the postcode found into a lat+long. Plotting them on a map is then trivial thanks to Google.

It’s an intriguing idea to try and find the /P from the SOTA database and use the summit location, which is known, and plot that. Not sure if I can do the whole thing in one T-SQL statement though. I’ll give it a whirl sometime.

Andy
MM0FMF

In reply to MM0FMF:
Thanks for the clarification, Andy. I suppose the proportion of s2s calls makes adding them a poor return for the effort involved. Looks interesting though.

73,
Rod