ARCHIVE: Australian Ham Radio Discussion Forum ( AHRDF )

Hello there in AR world,
  I have been considering ways to do a visual representation of my AR activity based on what's in my electronic logbook.  In the bygone year I would flick back through the pages of my paper log to see what days were of interest but find looking at an electronic log page less than inspiring.

So far I have come up with only one idea for this, having a row of dates across a page and each contact for that day listed under the date in UTC order, should would give me un upside down bar graph of activity.  Its a bit hard to draw it in this forum post but will see if I can mock up something to show what my mind is picturing.

Have any of you found a way to represent your log in different ways that are easy to interpret? as I would be interested to get some ideas from out there in the AR world.

Peter,

If there is a way to extract the distance from the logs, then a bar chart or plot of distances in chronological order might be cool.

Actually, a heat map might be a better way to show the distance vs time plots.

Hi Colin,
thanks for the thoughts, yes adding distance would be a good way to show up 'quality' vs 'quantity' on the log entries... will check if LOG4OM stores a calculated distance value to see if it is just that easy

Hi Peter,
Doesn't Gridtracker have a visual history of contacts?

Hey Colin,
thanks for prompting me to look at the distance values, LOG4OM does indeed record a calculated distance value based on the grid gathered in the QSO or that available on QRZ.COM. This has turned up a contact I had overlooked to a KP4 station (KP4EIT in Puerto Rico back in Jan this year) that gives me a distance greater than the current record listed on the WIA listing for SIX.

In a way this is part of why I wanted to better visualise my logbook as the fast paced rate of FT8 contacts can be a bit of a blur sometimes. I feel sure if it had been a SSB contact in the paper log it would have caught my eye sooner. This has brought heat mapping for distance idea you contributed up my list of things to strive for on my visualisation plans.

Hi Hilary,
  have not had any success with trying to view past events in gridtracker, seems I am missing some part of the formula to make this work with my LOG4OM logbook.

Peter,

Well it had to happen. I finally had to fluke a good idea, it's only taken 60 years

Glad to be of service.