Because of an exhausting 50 mile bike ride in the hot sun, I couldn't make it to Field Day on Saturday. I woke up late on Sunday, hoping to make some kind of belated appearance.
Just for fun, I started my HamTrack system at 9:47 am - a mashup of Google Earth, CW Skimmer, and C++ programs, glued together with some Unix tools, sed, grep, awk, along with the usual database fiddling and geolocating.
It is an end-to-end automated signal tracking system that translates RF morse code into pins on a map. So I left it running and headed over to the real Field Day, where, after catching up with my buds, I managed an impressive 2 contacts 15 minutes before the end of the event at 1 PM.
When I got home I discovered that 308 stations made 917 calls while I was gone, illustrated as pins in a map below. As in the 24 hour case, (previous blog), pins are colored by frequency, red for 6.9 MHz, blue for 7.1 MHz and spectral coloring in-between. My pin AE5CC is arbitrarily assigned red so I can find it in the sea of pins.
You will need the Google Earth browser plug-in to view the interactive map, and it takes a few seconds to load the data - about the time it takes to read this. If you don't use Google Earth, you're missing the best thing since sliced bread. - AE5CC
