[TangerineSDR] IGRF Python Package

Engelke, Bill bill.engelke at ua.edu
Wed Apr 1 13:04:55 EDT 2020


This does raise several issues we will need to deal with at some point.  Some notes…


  *   I have been pushing the software I am developing for the small board computer (to go into the TangerineSDR) to my repository on Github simply because it is the most straightforward way at this moment. It gives me the ability to recover without major loss of work if the Odroid I am using were to catastrophically fail; plus, if I were to drop dead next week due to coronavirus or something (a realistic possibility, unfortunately), somebody in the team may be able to make use of what I have done so far. The software is heavily commented.
  *   It would indeed be a good idea for TAPR to have its own github for this and related software to ensure its continued  access to it.
  *   On a related note, we (here at UA) have extensively discussed how to store data that will be collected from Personal Space WX Stations once we have the network running.  For Phase 1, we will simply put it on a UA server and make it publicly available (and cross-referenced by the database we are developing with NSF funding). It’s the longer term plan (Phase 2 and beyond) that is tricky. Many options have been floated: Zenodo, Madrigal, Grafana, Dropbox, OpenScienceDataCloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Box, etc. Each one has its pro and con, as well as a chorus of supporters and detractors. A complicating factor on that is that we’d hope to be able to enable some Big Data analysis approach; not to mention that many of these solutions will get quite expensive at scale; which is OK as long as we have funding… but this is part of the equation. As part of the current project (albeit in year 2022), we plan to evaluate the issues and make some recommendations (in what might become a Phase 2 NSF proposal if all goes well). We are most interested to hear everyone’s thoughts on this as we go forward; still, one thing we don’t want to do is end up with a “horse-designed-by-a-committee” (i.e., a camel) result. (Also, based on past experience, some neat new solution could become available in the next 2 to 3 years that would be even better than current options.)

-73- Bill AB4EJ


From: TangerineSDR <tangerinesdr-bounces at lists.tapr.org> On Behalf Of Phil Erickson via TangerineSDR
Sent: Wednesday, April 1, 2020 10:50 AM
To: TAPR TangerineSDR Modular Software Defined Radio <tangerinesdr at lists.tapr.org>
Cc: Phil Erickson <phil.erickson at gmail.com>; Stephen Roland Kaeppler <skaeppl at clemson.edu>
Subject: Re: [TangerineSDR] IGRF Python Package

Hi all,

  I strongly recommend that this project

a) use revision control
b) host its own SVN / git / etc. server

  Relying on things like GitHub is not safe in the long term, because corporate decisions can change abruptly on what is offered free to the community and what is not.  Also, many of the "free" services make absolutely no guarantees about where any of the data is backed up, what the backup schedule is, etc.

  I relate these pieces of advice from painful experience at MIT Haystack.  Our group believed Dropbox when they rolled out a storage plan with very large upper bound limits for MIT.  A couple years ago, they abruptly cancelled that policy and assigned a very large per year fee for the storage we had been using.  I'm still trying to figure out how to extract 100s of TB of data from them, and some of it may be lost for good.

73
Phil W1PJE

On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 11:45 AM Tom McDermott via TangerineSDR <tangerinesdr at lists.tapr.org<mailto:tangerinesdr at lists.tapr.org>> wrote:
Hi Steve - thanks for the offer !

This brings up a general question:  should TangerineSDR / PSWS host this kind of software someplace?
One could imagine that over time there may be an increasing number of software utilities and packages of
interest to the group, it would be nice to have them accessible through one link or portal (ideally with revision control ! ).

Is this something the group should consider?  If so, is github the right solution?, a page of links?, something else?

-- Tom, N5EG




On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 5:57 AM Stephen Roland Kaeppler via TangerineSDR <tangerinesdr at lists.tapr.org<mailto:tangerinesdr at lists.tapr.org>> wrote:
Hi All-

I will add a comment if it is of interest, that I wrote some code a while back in python that directly calculates the magnetic field using the IGRF coefficients and derivatives (useful in a ray tracer).  If you guys want that, I could package it up and send it over to anyone interested.

Thanks,
Steve

------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen R. Kaeppler, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Clemson University
Clemson, SC 29634
Email: skaeppl at clemson.edu<mailto:skaeppl at clemson.edu>
Phone: 864-656-4275
Web: http://science.clemson.edu/kaeppler/
Amateur Radio Callsign: AD0AE
------------------------------------------------------------


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----
Phil Erickson
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