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Keywords: Hamradio, Radio-amateurs, Maidenhead-, QTH-, (QRA-), Locator, Distance and Bearing Calculator, GNU/Linux command-line, LaTeX,- UTF-8-, ASCII-output, GPLv3; based on GM4ANB's book.
"IO91pm is the Maidenhead-Locator for Maidenhead"
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Background
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* For another little project, I wanted a QTH-Locator calculator for the UNIX (GNU/Linux, bash) command-line.
* There are many, some very good, online QTH resources, but I wanted something that would work off-line.
* There are also several GUI- (Windows-, X11-, etc.-) based calculators, but I wanted something for the command-line, something that could also be used in (bash-)scripts.
* The repository for my GNU/Linux distro has only one such a QTH-calculator.
--- This program has a few issues
--- Made worse by the adaption for Ubuntu, that removed half of its functionality
So, I had to roll my own. (Which I enjoyed anyhow.)
Perhaps also useful for others
Features
- Proper support for 2, 4, 6, 8 or 10 character locators. A 10 character locator specifies a cell of more-or-less the size of a house.
- The program accepts "dirty" locator strings that might be produced by databases, such as "Berlin JO62" or "IO91iq84po near Oxford"
- Calculations from cell-center (instead of south-west corner, as some programs do). This is especially better when computing between locators of different resolutions (locators with different number of characters).
- Distance calculation based on the best of GM4ANB's algorithms (instead of the simplest, as some programs do). The simplest algorithm can introduce an error of up-to a hundred meters within a relatively small, flat and low-lying, mid-latitude area such as the Netherlands. The best of GM4ANB's algorithms computes distances that fit, within a few meter, to the Dutch national grid reference system, the "Rijksdriehoekscoördinaten" system.
- This program reports an error estimate.
- When renaming the program (or creating a (soft-) link to it) with as new name a valid QTH locator, then distance calculations will be done from that locator.
- The program can produce LaTeX output.
- For further details, see: http://pe1aqp.krom.eu/software/IO91pm or the included man-page.
- And, lastly, the code uses τ (tau) instead of π (math pi).