Amalgamated DGPS Software Graph Window

[ChrisSmolinski]

The top of the graphing window displays a red graph that shows the number of messages per minute, to serve as a rough indicator of how good conditions are. You can see a very obvious diurnal pattern of low readings in the daytime that increase as darkness approaches, and DX stations start appearing.

I thought it might be interesting to modify the display to take into account the distance to each station's message received during that minute, rather than just a sum of the number of messages, that is to more heavily weigh more distant stations. I present four graphs below. The first one is the software as it is now, each message is weighted the same. The next three have different weights, the first is the square root of the distance to the station, the second is the distance to the station, the third is the square of the distance. The effect of each is to increase the dynamic range of the graph, to make the nighttime peaks larger.  My hope is that this would make it easier to compare this metric to various propagation indices, in the hope of finding some that correlate with propagation on the DGPS band.

What do folks think?

Current graph:



square root of distance:



distance:



distance squared:

[skeezix]

I think that should stay as it is today, with every station having the same weight.

However, having some indicator of distance is very useful. Perhaps a second graph, or some other method, that shows this.

With num decodes + distance, that will obscure somewhat the meaning of the graph.

Unsure as of now exactly how to make use of the distance- would it be as you have already described? Max distance? Avg distance? Avg distance beyond some limit (so the regular locals don't mess up the averaging)?


Need to think more about this...

[GuidoS]

Why not making it an option, while you have already written the code ? Just let the user choose.