VOACAP

VOACAP is considered by many to be the defacto standard HF propagation prediction tool.  Although originally developed on UN*X, the official release of VOACAP is now maintained on Windows (using the Salford Fortran compiler). This project represents an effort to compile VOACAP using the GCC GFortran compiler.  With the help of Greg Hand and a GUI from Jari Perkiömäki (OH6BG), development has reached a point where the program is in a usable state and may be of interest to others.

voacapl will simply be a ported version of VOACAP; changes to the core algorithms/functionality should continue to be committed via the current maintainers of the VOACAP source.  Any changes to the core program that are accepted and published by Greg will then make their way into voacapl.

Instructions and examples on running voacapl may be found in the man page.

I'd like anyone who feels they have something to offer to get involved, even if it's just to let me know that they've managed to get it running on a different platform/distribution.  For that matter, I'd be interested to know of any platforms it doesn't run on.

Python scripts (pythonProp) to plot the output of voacapl have been produced and are described here.

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The voacapl application: voacapl-0.4.2.tar.gz
The itshfbc directory: itshfbcFiles18Apr08.tar.gz
The python scripts to display the output files: pythonProp-0.1.tar.gz
The input GUI VOACAP-Linux-R2.gz (offsite link)

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The following assumes some familiarity with command lines, makefiles and ideally VOACAP itself. Specific instructions have been provided for Fedora (F8) and Ubuntu (8.04). All of the following should be performed logged in with your normal user name unless otherwise stated.

There are a few dependencies required to build/run the application and associated GUIs:

• GNU Fortran compiler GFortran
• Matplotlib and the basemap package.
• Support for older 'C' Libraries

Fedora (F8):  All of the dependencies are available in the standard repos and may be installed with the command;

Ubuntu (8.04):  Most of the dependencies are available from the standard repositories and may be installed with the following command;

Note users with 'AMD64' machines will also need to install 32 bit support (for the GUI) with the following command;

The basemap toolkit is not in any of the repos (that I know of) so needs to be installed from source.  Download the source files from here (this procedure has been tested using version 0.9.9.1 of the toolkit.)  Once downloaded, follow the instructions to compile and install the toolkit (including the required 'geos' package)

Other Platforms:  If anyone has advice on how to install these libraries on other platforms, please let me know how so that I can post instructions here.

All Platforms: The program requires the presence of a number of data files to run correctly.  The complete directory structure is contained within 'itshfbc.zip' which may be downloaded from the downloads section.  Expand the zip archive and from the top level of the newly created 'itshfbcFiles' directory, type 'make' or 'make install'.  This will use GFortran to build the coefficient files then copy everything to your home directory.

Download the voacapl archive, from the downloads section and uncompress it.

Build the main program:  From the ~/voacapl/ folder, type './configure' followed by 'make'.  The program 'voacapl' will be built in the VOACAPW directory just below the make location.

Following compilation, install the program by typing 'make install' (you'll probably need to be logged in as root or use the 'sudo' prefix to do this). Hint: a slimmed down binary may be installed by using the 'make install-strip' command instead.

Download the GUI from the link in the downloads section and install in /usr/local/bin (or similar). Note you may need to change the permissions on the GUI application to allow it to be run as an executable.

Download the scripts from the downloads section and install with the commands;
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Sincere thanks to Jari Perkiömäki (OH6BG), Alex Hill (G7KSE) and Lowell (KC7DX) for bug testing, support and suggestions.

Thanks also to the folks at NodeThirtyThree for the templates.

This software is supplied 'as is' without any warranty, implied or otherwise. Enjoy.

Please feel free to write to me and let me know how you get on. My (human readable) email address is jimwatson 'at' mac (dot) com. However, please understand that like most of us, I have a day job and as such, work commitments mean that I may not always be able to respond in a timely manner.

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