Monitoring: Visualizing with free Tableau Public Software
2019 is the year of groundbreaking Software-defined radios, covering the whole HF range of 30 MHz width and recording it for many hours, e.g. from midnight to midnight. In combination with proper software, this allows for a fresh view onto monitoring.
For the screenshot on the top, I had monitored nine HFGCS channels from 3137 kHz to 23327 kHz in parallel (the 18003 kHz didn’t work, sorry) with Winradio’s SIGMA SDR, running with Simon Brown’s free software SDRC V3 and nine instances of MultiPSK decoder.
After automatic monitoring, I harvested all time-stamped logs stripped them from information not needed, and imported them to free Tableau Public software to visualize activity according to station, time and channel. This gives an overview on the monitoring session, propagation, time sequences of hopping from channel to channel etc. – you might zoom into the screenshot for a clearer look.
Thanks to Tableaus also stunning geospatial features, completely other views of the same log are available. The screenshot below shows the number of logs on all channels of a monitoring session of 12 hours.
You may zoom into this OSM[ap], and you may also have a zoomed satellite view (or this or that) which directly hits the feeder point of your antenna … if you know the exact location and this is a part of your log entry – see screenshot below.
The most versatile Tableau software also allows to relaize many other ideas to visualize monitoring; some of them already above horizon, others still below. To conclude this entry, I did a visualization of all HF stations/channels of AFAD, the Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Authority, heard by me over the last 18 months. Each (?) of the 81 Turkish provinces maintains an AFAD base, and all (most?) of them are communicating on HF. As Tableau has many detailed geographical already aboard, a visualization of channels/province being heard is easy.
