We've gotten far enough along this visualization path that we might benefit from reflecting on what we've done and what we've learned along the way.
# Intention
My intermittent interest in ham radio has been fueled by technological innovations that come along every decade or so. Amateur radio is the only service where the license permits one to think up something, build it, and then operate it on the air without further regulatory review.
Astrophysicist Joe Taylor's software launched the recent revolution which now consumes most radio operations. His short and highly structured communications are initiated with a click and complete on their own but still maintain the habits and aspirations of radio operators all over the world.
Taylor's software came along while we have been revisiting the data handling capabilities of federated wiki. Might wiki offer some solutions to problems presented by the increasingly complex computer systems built and maintained by professionals in my industry? And might data streaming from Taylor's software be sufficiently similar to be a good model for exploring these opportunities?
# Iteration
Taylor's software decodes dozens of simultaneous transmissions and provides sufficient user-interface to complete radio contacts. It also relays contacts by internet datagrams to other services, such as federated wiki, that can make sense of them. Here we describe the sequence of experiments based on this data feed and guided largely by a desire to show what wiki can do.
Recording the Feed from multiple radios.
Rendering Charts and Graphs of interesting properties.
Modeling Spatial Representation of dense datasets.