Polar Stereographic Projection

Many faxes, several satellite pictures (like this), from US NOAA, UK MET, Germany DWD, French Meteo France, are using some conic projection I could not figure... it was not Lambert, not Conic Equidistant...
Fritz (from Wien, Austria) told me that could be a Stereographic projection.
I tried it, implementing it in the ChartComponent project...
Obviously, that was not right...

After watching the fax from the UK MET, the geostrophic scale explicitly says "Polar Stereographic Projection". Aha! There we are:

Now we are talking! Polar, that's all the difference.
Now, we can even stack a GRIB on top, that really makes sense.
Kudos to Fritz!

It's now available in the Weather Wizard.
More patterns are coming soon, keep posted.

Rain in the SF Bay

It's raining in the San Francisco Bay Area...
This winter has been very unusual so far, sunny and dry - and cold.
The responsible is the 500mb configuration, as explained in this article. It also explains why at the same time the weather has been so bad in Alaska.

Java-Pactor Communication, part 2

It works. Even the communication with the Icom cloning cable is working.

Below an example of the NAVTEX output we get.

The code is available at GoogleCode.

Java-Pactor Communication

I managed to establish the communication between Java code on the laptop and the SCS Pactor modem that is connected to the SSB, I've written a simple and basic character mode console that works on both Linux and Windows.

I will create a Google Code project, but in short, here are the parameters to set to the serial port:

Baud Rate: 57600 bps
Data bits: 8
Stop bits: 1
parity   : none
RTS/CTS in   [ ]
RTS/CTS out  [x]
XON/XOFF in  [ ]
XON/XOFF out [ ]
RTS : [x]
CTS : [ ]
DSR : [ ]
CD  : [ ]
DTR : [x]
RI  : [ ]

Notice the RTS/CTS in, that remains unchecked.
I want to be able to read Navtex data, and receive faxes in the future. That would imply some signal processing (FFT and this kind of things). That sounds interesting...

javax.comm on Windows

After looking for the 64 bits version of the java commapi package, I came across a post saying that "Oracle no longer supports the javax.comm API for any Windows", what a good news! Ah crap!
But eventually, I came across another post that lead me to http://rxtx.qbang.org/wiki/index.php/Using_RXTX.
It implements the comm api for all the systems you can think of..., Windows 32 & 64 bits, Sparc Solaris, Linux, Mac, and you can do the switch in no time. Really. And it is free and open source.
Ok, now I can keep reading NMEA data...

Presenting the trip

We will be presenting the trip on Friday Sep the 30th, in the auditorium of the Lycée, on Ortega in San Francisco.
The presentation will be in French, but we'll be able to take questions in English as well.
See you there!

SQL/XML Tides

We've now got new Google Code projects, implementing the full Tide applications features. The harmonic coefficients can be stored in XML documents, as well as in a relational database (Hypersonic SQL).
Check out http://code.google.com/p/tide-engine-implementation for details.

Background for the composites

The feature is now available.
The background is an image stored locally - as such, it is available even off line, like for the SailMail users.
The background behaves like a fax, it can be displayed, or not.
It is actually not only looking good, this is a nice-to-have feature.

Weather Wizard new look

Working on an option to have an image as a background for the charts in the Weather Wizard... Here is a preview of what it could look like.

Google Earth

Our wake is now available for Google Earth, from the Trip's page.
Also visible from here. Check it out, it looks good ;o) !