The map brightness setting could not make the map visible on a vector
theme, which is the one place it was needed. Those themes want the ground
well out of the way -- a tinted photograph of a county behind the vectors is
the one thing that stops a vector display looking like one -- and that was
done by multiplying the setting by about a quarter. A multiplier is a
ceiling: turned the whole way up, the setting still gave a map at a tenth
the brightness the default theme gives, which is to say invisible, and no
amount of turning it up did anything about that.
It is a curve now rather than a ceiling. The theme raises the setting to a
power, so the middle of the range is still quiet -- seventy per cent lands
where the old quarter did, which is the look these themes are for -- and the
top of the range is a full-brightness map on every theme there is. On the
green phosphor the setting now spans a luminance of six to seventy where it
used to stop at twenty-one.
And the options are in six groups rather than one list: receiver, listening,
aircraft, animation, the map, labels. Thirty-three of them on one screen is
a wall rather than a menu. A number opens a group and a number inside it
changes an option, with the numbers still being each option's place in the
whole list so that the same number means the same option wherever it is
typed -- which meant reordering the list so that every group is contiguous,
and there is a test that says so.
A group menu makes a known option harder to reach than a flat list did, so
the name works too: typing "map brightness" at the top goes straight to it,
and part of a name lists everything it could mean. A name that matches
exactly wins outright, so "speed" reaches the setting called speed rather
than that one and every other whose description happens to mention the word.
One thing to know: a bare number at the top of the menu now opens a group
where it used to edit the option of that number. The tests that drove the
menu that way would have gone on silently editing whatever option shared the
number, so they ask by name now, and one of them checks that a group number
changes nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
Three things asked for, and a fourth found while doing them.
The map looked like a photograph of a map, and did so twice over. The
window fetched at its own pixel size but for a box a third larger in each
direction -- the margin added to stop the ground blinking -- and then cut
the middle out, so every pixel was enlarged by two thirds. It now asks
for enough pixels to cover the bigger box at the window's own detail.
Underneath that, both the window and the animation took the nearest source
pixel: the tile mosaic is commonly half again the size of the picture, so
most of every tile was thrown away and what survived was the aliasing.
Both now average the source pixels that fall in each output cell, done as
the difference of a running total rather than a loop.
An aircraft that goes quiet now fades instead of vanishing. Taking it off
between one frame and the next says it stopped existing; fading says it
stopped talking, which is what happened. It fades where it was last
actually seen and never along a reckoned track, because the reason for
giving up on it is that where it would be by now is a guess. --fade sets
how long, and it is in the menu. The window has alpha and fades smoothly;
an indexed picture cannot blend, so the animation gained a fourth ramp at
a seventh of full and fades in four steps, which at a second apart reads
as a fade. A trail fades with the aircraft it belongs to, and the box
goes before the symbol does.
The aircraft's country of registration carries a flag now as well as the
two ends of its route, from the register where one answered and from the
address block otherwise.
And the fourth: the window's header counted an aircraft that had gone
quiet as overhead, which was saying more than had been heard.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
A first real capture came back as a map spanning 240 degrees north to 20
south, with the aircraft an indistinguishable smudge in one corner. Two
separate faults, one of them mine from the start.
A position is sent as half a position -- an even frame and an odd one --
and the pair only means anything while the aircraft has not moved between
them. The registry kept the last of each forever and paired them
regardless of age, so an even frame from ten minutes ago decoded against
a fresh odd one to a place on the wrong side of the world. Measured: a
pair 300 seconds apart puts the aircraft 2,566 nm from where it is, and
one night's log had it happening to two aircraft in three, with eleven
positions off the planet altogether. A pair is now good for ten seconds,
the answer has to be on Earth, and the aircraft has to have been able to
reach it.
--radius, defaulting to a hundred, frames the picture on the receiver
rather than on whatever was heard, so the scale is the same from one
evening to the next. In the same unit as the speeds. The centre is the
median of everything heard, which a handful of wrong positions cannot
move, or --at LAT,LON says where the aerial is.
--recheck repairs a log recorded before all this: for each aircraft it
keeps the longest run of positions that could describe one aeroplane.
Not a forward walk dropping whatever disagrees with the last position
kept -- that lets one bad fix become the reference, and on the same log
it discarded a fifth of everything, most of it the truth.
Two calibrations came from the recording rather than from taste. The
failures separate cleanly -- a hundred artefacts under a mile, twelve
hundred real errors over fifty, and nothing in between -- because
positions are stamped to the millisecond, so two a thousandth of a second
apart imply thousands of knots across a few yards. Nothing under two
miles is called an error. Afterwards the worst surviving jump is 513 kt.
One rendering bug the tighter frame exposed: an aircraft just off the top
left painted 743,774 pixels of an 844,200-pixel picture, because the dot
at a marker's centre clamped its near edge and left the far one alone, and
numpy reads a negative slice end as counting back from the far side. And
a still of a whole evening was dead-reckoning every aircraft forward to
the final moment, which for a ten-hour log flew 291 of 335 clean off the
picture; a still now draws each where it was last actually heard.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
Four things the ADS-B mode was missing, and one it was actively getting
wrong.
The band plan lists 1090 MHz because that is where ADS-B is, so choosing
it from the band plan is the obvious thing to do -- and it records the
bursts as clicks in a WAV file and decodes nothing, silently. Both the
scanner and the menus now say so, before the sweep starts, and name the
mode that does decode it. It is not refused: looking at the raw spectrum
is a fair thing to want.
Menu 5, Aircraft (ADS-B), is the whole mode without a command line. Every
option on one screen with a line saying what it does, ?N for the long
version and the flag it corresponds to, l to listen, m to draw a map from
any log, s to keep the options. The listening and the drawing moved into
bandsaunter/aircraft.py so the menus and the command line run the same
code.
While it listens the screen is a live board: one line per aircraft in the
order first heard, the counter climbing as frames arrive, height coloured
low warm to high cold with an arrow for climb or descent, the age of the
last report going green to red, and the line removed once nothing has been
heard for --hold seconds, everything below moving up. The registers are
asked while it runs, so registration, type, operator and route fill
themselves in as the answers arrive.
--speed-unit knots|mph|kph changes the heading of that board, the speed
beside every aircraft on the map and the speeds in the report, and moves
the distances with it so that one picture never carries two different
miles. The log stays in knots, which is what the aircraft broadcast.
And there is a real map under the flight paths: {z}/{x}/{y} tiles fetched
once, cached in ~/.cache/bandsaunter/tiles, reprojected from Web Mercator
pixel by pixel, inverted and dimmed so the aircraft stay the brightest
thing on the picture. The PNGs are decoded here -- zlib and the five row
filters from the specification, checked byte for byte against Pillow on
real tiles -- so nothing new is depended on. Tiles are cached and never
re-fetched, every request says who is asking, and the attribution is drawn
onto the picture, because a GIF travels without its readme.
conftest now fails any test that reaches for a tile server or a register.
It caught four of these on the way in.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
The Dust Council