CueSo (Advanced Amateur Radio QSO Logging Software)

After the purchase of my WinRadio Software Defined Radio (SDR), I started listening to a lot of radio amateur traffic on the 20 and 15m bands. I use a very compact active antenna which is only about 40cm long mounted vertically off the side of my apartment balcony here in London. I was interested to see what sort of range and performance I could get using this setup (which is less than desirable) and wanted to be able to plot these on a map and perhaps do some basic spatial analysis on received signal strengths etc.

Obviously my first stop was good old Google maps to plot out the locations of the stations I was recieving. QRZ.com is a great site that lets you get the QTH (location) of stations given their call sign - and this is what I used to determine where the stations were. Unfortunately Google maps gives misleading results if you are interested in the location of stations relative to your own. This is because Google maps uses an innaproproate map projection to display locations given in geographical coordinates (Latitude and Longitude). Azimuth and distance are distorted using the Mercator projection under Google maps. A polar projection centered at the receiving station is more appropriate for this type of map display.

So my second stop was to load up the data in ArcGIS (Geographic Information System) and choose a polar coordinate system centered at my appartment. I was intending to put some sort of nice interface on top of ArcEngine to allow me to add and query the logged stations more easily - however I found ArcMap so slow that I decided it would be better just to write my own display engine and implement the QSO logging software from scratch. This would also give me more creative control over what I wanted to do.

CueSo is the result of this software development effort (developed in C#):

Fig 1: Screen Capture of CueSo in Map Display and Spatial Analysis Mode.

The software allows you to:

• Leverage the QRZ.com database to quickly search for stations given call sign (CueSo consumes an XML based service provided by QRZ.com).
• Data entry utilises as much auto-complete and look-up intelligence as possible. This is to simplify and speed up an otherwise tedious task.
  
• Recorded and log QSOs based on the ADIF standard fields (Amateur Data Interchange Format).
• Query the QSO database using SQL (standard query language) - allows for complex queries to be performed.
• Display QSOs in a polar map display. Map display options are configurable.
• Choose from a number of geodetic engines to perform the map projections (Half-Versed-Sine (haversine), Spherical Law of Cosines, Vincenty, Redfearn's Formula).
• Maidenhead locators (grid squares) are calculated on the fly and are displayed along with geographical coordinates.
  
• Perform spatial analysis on received signal strengths using an anti-aliasing kernel over the QSOs to generate a raster surface which can be normalised by distance to station and radio path density. The raster engine is my own "RasterSurface" engine which I will feature in this blog at some stage in the future).
  
• Make simple graphs from the QSO database (countries contacted, contacts over time, frequency utilisation etc.).
• Pull space weather information (important for radio propagation conditions) from the NOAA Space Weather web service.
• Make audio recordings of the QSOs and play them back at a later date. I did this using the DirectX Direct Sound libraries - but have also included an option to use low-level WAV capture using code from Ianier Munoz (avoiding the need for DirectX).
  

Screen Captures:
Fig 2: Logging on to QRZ.com Services.

Fig 3: CueSo displaying QSOs in tabular form with an SQL query applied. Left panel is the data entry control.
Fig 3.5: Perform advanced SQL queries using the query builder.

Fig 4: CueSo's map display and various display options. You can change colours, fonts, layer displays etc. And it's much faster than ArcGIS!

Fig 5: CueSo's GIS-like functionality showing Identify (point-and-click) and Search results.

Fig 6: Spatial analysis of signal strength received normalised by distance to station.

Fig 7: Graphing options (Countries contacted in this case). Also shows the list of available graphs that can be generated.

Fig 8: 3 day satellite environment plot from NOAA showing electron / proton flux, magnetometer and estimated planetary K values.

Fig 9: Latest auroral activity plot for the north pole (from NOAA).

Fig 10: Showing audio play back from a recorded QSO.

I want to add wave propagation modelling to the software at some stage in the future. The modeling will utilise the ITS Irregular Terrain Model algorithm for direct wave propagation - but I also hope to include ionospheric and satellite propagation modeling modules too.