ZL On the Air

PoLo - Issues & Ideas
1

Hi Team,

In New Zealand our local site ZL on the Air is very popular. While we do still do POTA / SOTA etc there are far more parks in ZL on the Air. Is this something PoLo would consider adding as an operation type?

If so, what data is needed and in what format? I am happy to work with the ZL on the Air team to get the GIS data and get it into the right format.

Keen to help.

Cheers,

Chris
ZL1UCH or for the last week, VK/ZL1UCH :smiley:

2

Hi Chris,
Firstly thanks for the P2P yesterday.
As far as programs are concerned, @M1SDH / Steve is the master of adding programs.
Itā€™s reasonably simple dependent on his availability.
You need a downloadable (always available) resource in csv file format for the activation locations similar to the POTA csv download
https://pota.app/all_parks_ext.csv
or this for Silos in VK:

ID,LAT,LNG,ARTY,NAME,LOCALITY,STATE,COUNTRY,SILO_CODE,RAILWAY,RAIL_STATUS,NOT_BEFORE,NOT_AFTER,TOTAL_ACTIVATIONS,COMMENT,LINK,LGA_CODE,LOCATOR,RATING,STREET_VIEW,PARK
1554,-32.169081,150.892421,false,Aberdeen,Aberdeen,New South Wales,Australia,VK-ABN2,Hunter Line,Operational,2021-03-27T11:17:02Z,,1,,"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberdeen,_New_South_Wales",UH2,QF57kt,Interesting,"https://www.google.com/maps/@?api=1&map_action=pano&viewpoint=-32.169137,150.892156&heading=76&pitch=38&fov=120&calc",

Then Steve can weave his magic
Alan

3

Thanks Alan. Sounds promisingā€¦ ZL-OTA has all the data in a GIS server running a WFS so it would be pretty easy for me to write a WFS client to regularly extract to the correct format. Iā€™ve reached out to ZLOTA to check they have no objections before i do anything.

4

Iā€™m the admin for ZLOTA (ZL on the air). We currently publish a csv file with the following data:

id,name,code,x,y,asset_type
35888,Ackers Point,ZLB/001,168.163650908159,-46.8955991917859,lighthouse

https://ontheair.nz/assets/assets.csv

ZL award programmes covered are: huts, lakes, parks, lighthouses, volcanos, islands

I can add more fields if needed. Which of the fields in the SiOTA example above are necessary for the various ZL award programmes covered by ZLOTA to be added to POLO?

Matt - ZL4NVW

5

Hi Matt,
Iā€™ll leave @M1SDH /Steve to respond to the assets fields, but possibly more importantly, how do you guys spot to assets other than POTA/WWFF/SOTA etc which are already catered for?
I assume that you pull spots from POTA, ParksnPeaks pulls spots from you?Perhaps explain how the spots are pushed and pulled for ZLOTA across different resources?
Alan

6

re spotting:

ZLOTA spots / alerts can be created at either ontheair.nz or parksnpeaks and viewed on both platforms.

ZLOTA spots are currently mostly entered locally through ontheair.nz. This can be done via the web interface, the SMS gateway or the inreach/email gateway. There is also a spotting / alerting API at ontheair.nz, which is currently not used by anything.

The iPnP app supports ZLOTA spotting and uses the parksnpeaks API to post them.

ZLOTA and parksnpeaks share spots and alerts. Any spots entered on ontheair are forwarded to parksnpeaks at the time of creation. Any spots entered at parksnpeaks get picked up by ontheair once per minute.

SOTA, POTA, WWFF spots are also pushed / pulled by ontheair to/from SOTA/POTA/PnP spotting databases as-per the parksnpeaks example above.

So it is possible to spot or alert for ZLOTA at either ontheair.nz or parksnpeaks. The only difference is that spots / alerts sent to ontheair directly get distributed to the ontheair spotting mailing list, whereas those coming from parksnpeaks (or SOTA, POTA, HEMA, WWFF) do not.

7

OK thanks Matt. I had a feeling here was some spaghetti involved in the spotting sideā€¦
The lighthouses, huts, islands, lakes, volcanos are clear enough.
Are all the parks in the list here non-WWFF/POTA parks?

Couple of things to feed into this, 1 WWFF is starting Spotline - a new WWFF exclusive cluster much like GMA - it is taking over from GMA for WWFF. 2. PnP/Allen is more and more busy on other things so thereā€™s not a lot of chance to get PnP overhauled if indeed itā€™s thought to be required.
It would be nice to get the ZLOTA specific spots into PoLo.
Do you have details of the ZLOTA api to share? And could the ZLOTA api be used to get WWFF spots on to PnP? If so it would kill 2 birds with one stone, since atm PoLo does not spot on PnP other than when POTA spots for VK parks get pulled from POTA spots.
Alan

8
  1. WWFF - thanks for the info. I will look into that and ensure that ontheair can forward WWFF spots to the new cluster.
  2. PnP: Nothing weā€™re talking about here would need any changes to PnP. But understood re Allenā€™s time limitations.
  3. ontheair API: Will get back to you with that when I get home from work (i.e. Sunday). I just checked the API documentation page, and I never got round to documenting the spotting API. So I will look at the code, check that it all still works and add documentation this weekend.
  4. ZLOTA parks: ZLOTA includes all gazetted (legally protected) parks in ZL that are over 10ha in size, and are of a type that allows public access. There are current 14468 such parks. Both POTA and WWFF include only a subset of those. For POTA it is currently all parks over 500ha (860) and for WWFF it is all parks over 1000ha (233). All POTA and WWFF parks are ZLOTA parks, but not all ZLOTA parks are in POTA or WWFF schemes.
  5. ZLOTA currently forwards all spots to PNP that are not forwarded to another scheme-specific cluster. From memory SOTA, HEMA and POTA all get sent to their own clusters and PnP collects them from there. ZLOTA and WWFF currently go directly to PnP.
9

OK - will be interesting to see the api
I can only think along these lines for making/keeping it simple
SOTA already goes to SOTA (from ZLOTA and PoLo)
POTA already goes to POTA (some spots - VK - get pulled back into PnP)
WWFF currently go to GMA but will move to Spotline 1st June from PoLo so I suppose it would be good if ZLOTA sent WWFF to Spotline as well as wherever it currently does - PnP.
That leaves PoLo to spot lighthouses, huts, islands, lakes, volcanos to ZLOTA if thatā€™s possible. This would make PoLo the most integrated option for activators.
Iā€™m not familiar with iPnP but I assume Sue will move into SpotLine and Peter was already looking at moving to GMA from VK-port-a-log so he will probably also go to SpotLine. As I said I am not sure if Allen will make further changes (e.g. re Spotline) or when they might occur.
Alan

10

OK. The thus-far unused spotting API at ontheair.nz has been documented and given a quick test to ensure it still works.

The spotting format is the same as for POTA, but with the addition of user validation though userID and APIkey fields. If POLO does not want to store individual usersā€™ ZLOTA account details, then we can add a single account for POLO.

Documentation here - see last entry

https://ontheair.nz/api

There is no alerting API currently, though adding one would be easy enough if there is a need.

Matt

11

Thanks Matt,
We just need @M1SDH Steve to clarify again the exact field values needed in the asset export.
Hopefully he sees an easy way to add ZLOTA to PoLo since it has so many similarities with other programs
Alan

12

Matt,
This post actually talks about the fields used from WWFF parks list. Perhaps you could provide the same fields for the ZLOTA assets to make the coding simpler on the PoLo side

So these fields would be used:
reference,status,name,program,dxcc,state,county,continent,latitude,longitude,dxccEnum

Alan

13

So that would be:
reference: ZLL/0001
status: active / inactive???
name: Abel Lake
program: ZLOTA
dxcc: ZL
state: null (or use this for region code - e.g. CB)???
county: null
continent: OC
latitude: -43.3391
longitude: 170.6382
dxccEnum assume this was included in error as we already have dxcc?

So weā€™re missing:

  • a field for the asset_type (award scheme) - i.e. Lake/Island/Lighthouse, etc unless we combine that into the programme field: e.g. ZLOTA Lake
  • a field for the region (unless we use state)

No useful values to put in:

  • county
  • state
    so just leave those blank?

Thoughts?

14

Unless you have a status - just leave them all as active
You can just use a - (dash) for region. There are many entities with no states.
State and county seem to be just reiterations of dxcc in the wwff file
This is what @M1SDH Steve said about dxccEnum

image
image795Ɨ128 18.2 KB

wrt asset_type it would be a lot less work to have them all in the this one file as if they are subprograms but Iā€™ll leave Steve to comment on that.

Alan

15

Regarding WWFF new spots & agenda service ā€œSpotlineā€ - throw us a message and weā€™ll provide you with API key and the URL for the spots. Reporting issues with the WWFF website and services | WWFF

16

OK. This is looking like more work than I can handle right now. Adding dxcc / dxccenum will need a whole new GIS layer with the boundaries of the various DXCC entities covering ZL, so that we can look up the dxcc for each park. The DXCCs do not match up to the government boundaries we currently have in our (geo)database. Plus adding the web interface to maintain that new data.

Iā€™ve time to reformat the csv which would have been an hourā€™s work, but not to add all of that right now which will take a day or so.

Things are very busy with work up to the end of the contract year on June 30th. Iā€™ll take another look at this in July (along with everything else!).

==

For those following in my footsteps, the mysterious dxccenum field appears to refer to the EntityCode listed in this PDF. I canā€™t find a digital version of the file, but the list is short enough to manually copy the EntityCode into one of the spreadsheet-friendly versions of the dxcc list (none of which seem to include EntityCode).

(reinstated after being flagged as inappropriate)

17

Thanks @OH3CUF - Iā€™ll also get onto that in July

1 Like
18

I must be on the wrong line here. I thought dxccEnum for New Zealand was 270 and thatā€™s it.
All your assets will be 270
As for dxcc it is ignored by PoLo so it can be blank as far as Steve was talking.
Alan

19

270 is Tokelau, I believe. Assuming it really is the DXCC EntityCode that ARRL provide. If it isnā€™t could you give me a definition / source?

According to the ARRL link above, ZLā€™s territory and ZLOTA assets lie in 170, 034, 133 and 016 which between them cover the mainland and the other ZL islands.

Plus waters in between for marine reserves.

As a cludge, I could filter out all the non-mainland assets (everything not in a local government district) and hardcode the EntityCode to 170. If thatā€™s acceptable in the interim.

But to supply the correct EntityCode for all island and marine assets, Iā€™d need to do a point in polygon query for the 4 DXCC zones (Iā€™d do that when each asset was created/updated and store the result, not do it on the fly on export).

Matt

20

OK well I am just going on the origin of the field value in the wwff Directory.csv file.
https://wwff.co/wwff-data/wwff_directory.csv
I only see 270 for ZL and the only diff are these:
|Chatham Is.|-|34|
|Kermadec Is.|-|133|
|Auckland I. & Campbell I.|-|16|
|Niue I.|-|188|

|Tokelau Is.|-|270|