73's Lee Alder KK4SXX

Transcription

1 Field Day Logging A Study in pain by B. Lee Alder III KK4SXX Field day. The day when amateur radio enthusiast snatch all their mobile gear and heads for Vegas, no wait, for the field!! Problems arise and are solved. Antennas are hung, somewhat with care with hopes of nothing landing on them. Grills are fired up. Generators are gassed up and running. I love the smell of generator exhaust, it smells like field day. So you spend the next 24 hours contacting the world and writing down on paper all your contacts. Maybe you have a netbook, laptop, ipad, Android Tablet, or a Surface tablet but some sort of electronic device you could use for logging. What software could you use? Well depending on your system (and the operation system), there are many great choices. They will all track your contacts, log them, and keep you from making duplicates entries. So Field Day is done and 'in the books' or is it? All the paper reports have to be collated, counted, and de-duped. Oh wait filed as well!! In our club the person who has performed this task in the past had made the statement that it had taken a week or two just to collate all the paper logs. They had also said they used Excel to try and perform this daunting task. Given were a 4A setup this year it can still lead to many pages of paper and much data entry. Heaven forbid we become a 19A (yes we had a QSO with a 19A group)!! How many trees died for those logs?? Then I had an idea. Why not a central system to log? Good idea but what platform to use? As a group we are extremely varied in background, skills, and expertise. So it goes to follow not all people would use the same computer platform. I myself use a Mac mostly. My good friend Jared uses Arch Linux, a few others have windows computers (I try not to hold that against them. but). So the operating systems are as varied as we are. I wonder what could work with all of them. Hey the internet! All the operating systems have some sort of internet browser. I could take advantage of that! This is how our clubs logging system was born. Necessity, the mother of invention as Plato stated (ok what he stated is A need or problem encourages creative efforts to meet the need or solve the problem. A quick web search did not find any solution. Fine I will write my own. The steps I took started by reading the ARRL rules regarding Field Day. Ok with that being as clear as mud. I turned to a few of the free logging programs to see how they operate as well as see how they interface to the user. I settled on the logging program named Squirl. It had an easy to

2 use and understand interface. Most everyone had at least heard of it, some having actually used it. It has a very simple interface (fig1). Even if you have not ever seen it or used it the interface is somewhat intuitive. Fig 1 Breaking down the parts of this program, the top line displays Station, Band, and Mode stay set once a person enters this information. The second line only requires a Call Sign, Class, and Section. After the 'Call' is entered, the program checks for duplicates at that time. If everything is good nothing happens. Once all fields are filled in and the 'Submit' pressed it then logs the contact. All these functions and items can be done with HTML (Hyper Text Mark Language), Javascript, AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and Xml), and PHP (Personal Home Page). Using MySql (a free data basing system), and Apache (a free web-server) all the tools I needed fit the budget my XYL set. The hardware needed is a web-server and a router. For the router I had an old Asus WL-520GU that I have installed DD-WRT (an open source router software). The router supplies WiFi to the area and handles traffic between the web-server and the stations. The Web-server is a Raspberry Pi running the current version of Raspbian (Linux for the Pi). I have set it up as a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, Php) type of server because the cost fit my budget (free, and 10,000 geeks can't be wrong!). The router handled DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, this assign all IP addresses). With the mandatory duct tape (well blue tape we ran out of the precious silver tape) and bungee cords we are ready for a Field Day!! The 'scripts' (names of the php scripts) on the web server were only 5. Two of them did most of the work they were INDEX.PHP and CHECKIT.PHP. The Index.php script served a web page to the clients (each user on our net) that looked like this

3 Fig 2 Wow that looks very familiar! If it did then great!! That was what I was going for!! An HTML version of Squirl. The script checked to see if 3 cookies (storage of information by a site on your computer) Station, Band, and Mode were present, if so then read them. This was so you didn't have to re-enter information if, heaven forbid the generator runs out of gas or the battery you are using runs out of power. Best yet if you are running Windows, your system crashes and you re-boot. When you enter the Station, Band, and Mode and it is different, it will update the cookies and place the cursor on the field named 'Call'. The date and time are updated automatically by Javascript. When you enter a Call and move off of the Call field, Javascript & AJAX make a request to the script CHECKIT.PHP. If not match is found (for that Station, Band, Mode, and Call) then nothing is returned and it is a good contact. If a match is found the Date-Time of the contact is returned. This causes the Javascript to print this information in the large text box (just above the Submit & Clear buttons), plays an error beep and places the cursor back on the Call box. When you fill out the two remaining boxes Class & Section and press enter (or click Submit). Javascript check to see if the message box is empty (meaning good contact) and that the other two fields are filled in, if so then POST!! Posting writes into the log file Station, Band, Mode, Date-Time (UTC), Call, Class, and Section. Then the count of entries for Station, Band, and Mode is made and posted to the web page for that Station and all is ready for the next QSO!! At

4 the end of Field day I used a simple MySql script to produce counts for every station, band, and mode as well as a list of all entries sorted my station, band, and mode. This I gave to the person who would be counting everything up (he is also the club president). He said it greatly help him out! This is all I have currently. This is a serious 'WIP' (Work In Progress). I would like to see maybe a Event Status Page with Total counts, Score Totals. This would be good to show visitors how we are doing in contest/exercise. I would also like to drop the router and turn the Raspberry Pi into an Access Point that will drive everyone to the right page to begin logging. There are endless possibilities and next year is just around the corner!! A picture of the setup is here with the obligatory blue tape (ran out of duct tape). web-pic

5 73's Lee Alder KK4SXX