One of the nice things about having a long break off work at Christmas is that I can write software for my entertainment. It never gets boring as there’s always something new to learn. Now I have the SOTA database to play with I thought I’d see what some of the data looks like on a map. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
So the following links take you to some Google maps of the UK. These are 1st drafts and are a bit rough. They show the geographic distribution of chasers for some popular hills. I was interested in where the chasers are located and what possible paths there are on VHF so only 144/432MHz was considered. As I said the maps are a bit rough, they show the chasers but not the summit location! Well that will be fixed another time. There’s only a few maps available and these are static files, the database searching has been done and saved. In future I think I’ll make it so you can select search criteria from the webpage. Some of the maps have a fair amount of data to download and a lot of Javascript to process. So they may take a good few seconds to download and draw. Zooming and scrolling can be a bit slow aswell depending on how fast your computer runs. Hover on a marker to show the chaser callsign.
http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/144-CS-001.html Ben Lawers
http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/144-LD-001.html Scafell Pike
http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/144-NW-001.html Snowdon
http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/144-NW-044.html Moel Fammau
http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/144-SP-001.html Kinder Scout
http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/144-SP-015.html The Cloud
http://www.moosedata.com/sotamaps/432-SP-015.html The Cloud
All the data comes from data which is in the public domain. The chaser data comes from the activator’s logs. i.e. the callsign the activator logged and uploaded to the database. Markers only appear for people in my callbook who were not details witheld and only for people located in G/GM/GW. S2S and other QSOs to stations who were not at their main station address are not considered. The accuracy of the marker will be better for those chasers located in urban areas, probably around 250m or so in these cases.
Enjoy!
Andy
MM0FMF