Monday, January 6, 2014

Equidistant Azimuthal Map Toolkit

I've put together a toolkit based on the free Quantum GIS (QGIS) software which allows you to easily produce publication quality equidistant azimuthal maps with a nice polar coordinate graticule. This could be useful for aiming a rotor, plotting QSOs, visualizing geographic QSO statistics, and other tasks of interest to the amateur community.


I do need more amateur related GIS data; polygons for DXCC entities, call sign prefix areas, stuff like that. Please drop me a line if you know where I can get these.

https://github.com/n1ywb/eqaztk

Latest version as ZIP file: https://github.com/n1ywb/eqaztk/archive/master.zip

What you get out of the box:

An equidistant azimuthal map of the world.

My QSOs in the recent 2013 ARRL 10m contest:
 

It includes the following features:
  • A complete QGIS 2 project http://www.qgis.org
  • World basemap from http://www.naturalearthdata.com/
  • Polar graticule with 5,000km & 30deg major and 2,500km & 15deg minor ticks
  • Polar graticule generation script
  • Lat/lon graticule
  • Saved style files for base map, polar, and lat/lon graticules
  • Print composer template optimized for US Letter sized paper

How to use project

Just open it in QGIS 2. It should already be in pretty good shape for most world map use cases, e.g. plotting DX QSOs. More instructions at the web site.

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