Last Saturday I was at a party co-hosted by Richard Weait (thanks), where the topic of maps for amateur radio use came up.
A topic that has been of interest to me is amateur radio and disaster response. So, I am looking for software that will generate two maps from Open Street Map data: - An azimuthal equidistant projection map for any arbitrary latitude / longitude - A day and night map (ie: what parts of the world are CURRENTLY in sunshine / darkness) So, what makes the requirement for the above a little tough? I want the software to be under the GPL (or some other open license) so it can be redistributed without issue. I want it for Linux (so the OS to support the application can also be redistributed without issue). I want the application to run stand-alone (so if there is a problem with the internet connection I don't want the application to suddenly become useless). The data for this can not be more than a few MB at most (but then this shouldn't be an issue, given that road, rail, land use data is irrelevant for these apps, all that is needed is continental outlines, MAJOR lakes, rivers, islands and cities). So, why the interest in these maps? Many amateur radio antenna are directional (doing a better job of receiving (or transmitting) a signal in one particular direction). With an azimuthal equidistant projection map done for your location, you can draw a line from the center of the map to the location you are interested in and that will instantly tell you the direction to adjust your directional antenna. This is static map, as in you generate the map once for a given latitude / longitude you are effectively done. High frequency radio signals can refract off the ionosphere allowing very long range communications with low power transmitters. What frequencies refract well depends on a number factors, including sunshine / darkness. So knowing that the place you want to talk to is in darkness is useful. So, a day night map would have to be dynamic, being updated say once per minute ... Anyone with ideas as to where I could / should turn for the above? Thanks. Colin McGregor VE3ZAA _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
