Collection of improvement ideas about splat HOT 3 OPEN

I think the main reason the sdf files exist is so the srtm/hgt files can be preprocessed (if I recall correctly there's some smoothing done and holes filled) and converted to a form that can be quickly loaded when you run SPLAT! itself. I think we can just go with GeoTIFFs though, and it'd be nice to use a known standard. Any extra loading time is going to be negligible with modern hardware.

I would certainly like to clean up the coordinate system and convert to metric system internally. That's bugged me for awhile but hasn't been a top priority.

I hadn't noticed the minimum power level/max range issue; I'll have to look into it. Sounds like a bug that needs fixing.

As mentioned in my To Do list in the README.md file, I would like to compartmentalize the code more, breaking it up into several files. The way it generates the output files in particular needs to be modularized, with the HTML generated from templates rather than embedded in the code.

The other thing I wanted to do was pull main() out and turn the rest of the code into a library (with a well-defined API) that could be linked to. That way it'd be easy to something like add a GUI to it (QT wrapper?), or call it from python or golang etc to integrate it into a nice website.

John M. had wanted to add another feature to it, but I think he got as far as building it with my changes and verifying his tests produced the same results, but then got busy with something else.

from splat.

Hi @hoche,
great to hear that you are still involved in SPLAT!. I will try to contribute some features/bug fixes, but can't overtake the maintainer role due to limited leisure time. However, by using SPLAT at work (university), I currently invest severals weeks into a propagation prediction part in my research project.

What is still unclear to me:

• Do the original authors (John, Dough and Ron) know about your fork and agree on us releasing an official SPLAT 2.0 version - in particular losing backward compatibility breaking old habits (map projection, SI units, changed arguments, new dependencies,...)
• If so, would they support us to start an official website (away from qsl.net) in order to bundle all the spread information littering on the internet...

from splat.

John certainly knows about the work I've done and we talked several times early last year about doing a 2.0 release. He sent me his antenna height modifications that I incorporated. However, he had something come up and I got sidetracked by another project and so we haven't discussed anything in months.

I don't think Doug or Ron have been involved in the project in years. I haven't talked to them.

I've tried to get in touch with Sid Shumate several time over the past two years but haven't had any response. I wanted him to look over my changes to the ITM/ITWOM file. Also there was a study a few years ago by a group in Athens that seemed to show that the ITWOM changes just slow the calculations down and don't produce any better results (in fact, they're worse). I wanted to get his thoughts on that.

I would certainly like to have my fork be declared as the official release and have John update his website to reflect that. He might be amenable to having a new website set up though; I'm not sure. At any rate, I think it's pretty silly how many versions of this are out there. I have deliberately trying to keep my changes from getting too wildly different from John's mainline release in the hopes of making them more acceptable to him, but it's limiting what can be done.

from splat.