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HZ1JW Software

Introduction

pythonProp is a collection of Python scripts designed to create voacap input (.dat) files and plot the resulting predictions.  The package makes use of the matplotlib library (voaAreaPlot also requires the basemap toolkit.)

The package is released under the GPL license so may be freely modified. Please post any changes that may be of use to others via the contact details at the bottom of the page.

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Screenshots

See below for a few screen shots of the voacapgui application and some plots produced with the pythonProp utilities;
Input File voaP2PPlot voacapgui Multiple voaP2PPlot voa3dplot
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voacapgui

An input GUI for voacapl.  This is under active development - please pass on any feature requests / bug reports.

The program is started from the command line with the command 'voacapgui'.

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voaP2PPlot

This script plots the output of a Point-to-Point prediction. Signal to Noise (SNR), Reliability (REL), Maximum Usable Frequency (MUF) or Received Signal Strength (S DBW) may be plotted. The application supports time shifting of the lower (GMT)

Refer to the man page for details.

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voaAreaPlot

This script plots the output of VOAARea predictions (.VGx files). Signal to Noise (SNR), Reliability (REL) or Maximum Usable Frequency (MUF) may be plotted. To produce correct type of input projection data files, the projection type flag in the input file's GRIDSIZE card must be set to '1', i.e.

Gridsize : 59 1

See the man page for details.

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Downloads

The latest version of the scripts is available on the sourceforge site; https://sourceforge.net/projects/pythonprop/.

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Installation

The scripts require the 'matplotlib' library and associated 'basemap' toolkit.  These libraries are under constant development and scripts written to work with one version may break on others. Version 0.10 of the scripts has been written/tested against Matplotlib (v1.0.0) and Basemap (>=0.99).

Ubuntu

Matplotlib and the basemap toolkit are available from the Ubuntu 12.04 repositories and may be installed with the command;

$ sudo apt-get install python-matplotlib python-mpltoolkits.basemap

Fedora (F15)

All required libraries are available from Fedora's repositories. The following command will install the basemap package (which will in turn call up and install all required dependencies);

$ su -c 'yum install python-basemap'

All Distributions:   If not available from your distro's repositories, matplotlib and the basemap toolkit may be installed from source files available from the following URLs;

Matplotlib: http://sourceforge.net/projects/matplotlib/files/matplotlib/

Basemap: http://sourceforge.net/projects/matplotlib/files/matplotlib-toolkits/basemap-1.0.3/

Once downloaded, follow the instructions to compile and install each package with the usual setup.py commands;

python setup.py build 
python setup.py install

Note:  If anyone has advice on how to install these libraries on other platforms, please let me know how so that I can post instructions here.

pythonProp: Download the pythonProp package from the link above and use the following commands to install the scripts;

$ gunzip -c pythonProp-0.10.tar.gz | tar x
$ cd pythonProp-0.10
$ ./configure
$ sudo make install

The installer places the python scripts in /usr/local/share/pythonProp and shell script 'wrappers' in /usr/local/bin.

Upgrading From Earlier Versions: Earlier distributions placed the mufPlot, voaAreaPlot.py and voafile.py in /usr/local/bin. It's probably safer to delete these older files.

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Acknowledgements & Disclaimer

Sincere thanks to Jari PerkiPerkömäki (OH6BG), Alex Hill (G7KSE), Lowell (KC7DX) and Andreas Weller for bug testing, support and suggestions.

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