[CQ-Contest] PJ2T ARRL DX Maps

[Kenneth E. Harker]

     I'm starting to adapt my code to draw maps from Cabrillo logs as 
well as the ARRL line scores database.  The team at PJ2T sent me their 
logs from the 2004 ARRL International DX Contest, CW and phone, to map.

http://www.wm5r.org/maps/2004arrldxcw/
http://www.wm5r.org/maps/2004arrldxph/

      Looking at this map, one of the things I like to look for is 
metropolitan areas with either way more or way less activity than you 
would think that their general population would warrant.  In Texas,
for instance, you will notice almost twice as many dots clustered around 
Austin as there are around San Antonio.  Despite the fact that the Dallas/
Fort Worth metroplex and the Houston metro areas are almost exactly the 
same population (see http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa122099c.htm)
there are two to three times as many dots around DFW as there are around 
Houston.  Does this mean that the hams in DFW are just more spread out?
Or are there really that many more of them in the DX contests?

     The metro areas of St. Louis, Missouri and Denver, Colorado have 
almost the exact same population, but the Colorado front range is clearly a 
more active center of radio contesting than St. Louis, which in fact,
looks to have less activity than many other cities of even a million fewer 
inhabitants (such as Kansas City, MO, Indianapolis, IN, or Orlando, FL.)
At first glance, Miami, Florida (the twelfth largest metropolitan area
in the country) looks very under-represented, but of course everyone in 
Miami-Ft. Lauderdale lives very close to the coast, so maybe that's
misleading.

     It's clear in all the contest maps I've drawn that the Boston to 
Washington metropolitan area has an enormous volume of radio contesters.
It's also the case that lower South Carolins, southern Georgia, southern 
Alabama, and central Mississippi are a sort of dead zone of sparse activity 
between the Gulf coast plus Florida and the rest of the South.  Most of 
West Viriginia is also sparsely represented in the contest maps.

     In the process of making these maps, I discovered that the U.S. 
Census Bureau TIGER map server can only handle 5001 dots on a map at once.
I changed my code to only draw one dot per unique lat/lon pair (no longer
drawing dots of the same or different colors directly on top of one another.)
Fortunately, enough stations made multiple QSOs and enough contesters live
in the same ZIP codes that for the PJ2T phone log, there were just shy of 
4,000 unique lat/lon values.


-- 
(Note: I have changed my primary personal email account.  Please replace
 your address book or alias listings of kharker at cs.utexas.edu with 
 kenharker at kenharker.com.  Thanks! - 31 March 2004)

--
Kenneth E. Harker WM5R
kenharker at kenharker.com
http://www.kenharker.com/