Plotting Local Coronavirus Cases

Here in Scotland (and in England) the governments publish coronavirus data daily. But they do not show the data in a particularly useful way as it is simply a count of cases confirmed so far. These counts are useful as they can show whether the health service is likely to cope with the outbreak or not today, but they do not show the history of the pandemic.

Jason Leitch Flattening

I believe the important information is to see a graph of the confirmed cases to allow you to judge if the wanted flattening of the curve is happening or not. This curve is explained here by Scotland’s National Clinical Director, Jason Leitch. Also what matters to most people is what is happening locally to themselves and their loved ones.

So I’ve knocked together a MATLAB script to plot some graphs for the Lothian Health Board and the Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board in Scotland and the East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust in England. The script gets its data from Tom White’s GitHub page. As Tom says, this data should be made available officially but does not appear to be published yet in a usable format. Thanks for the data, Tom!

I’m not a MATLAB guru and I’m sure my script could be written better and be more robust. But it works for me. Here is the code. MATLAB is quite expensive (I use it for playing about with radios and electronics) but the script could probably be rewritten in Octave with something replacing the TimeSeries variables. Spreadsheets would  work too but I’m even less a guru in them than MATLAB.

And the grim results, no doubt to become much grimmer due to the expected exponential growth of cases. Early days yet.

Lothian

Glasgow

Esussex

Remember to wash your hands!

SignaLink Jumpers for FT290R

Here’s how to set the jumpers in a SignaLink USB when connecting a Yaesu FT290R.

FT290R Front

I found the jumper instructions on the Tigertronics website just a little too general, so this may save some time.

WARNING: I now think these are wrong. Please see my post of 27th July 2021.

Signalink jumpers for FT290R IMG 1043

The SignaLink works fine with PocketPacket on a Mac mini. ‘Use Vox for PTT’ was set in the PocketPacket Audio Modem preferences. The SignaLink delay knob was turned fully anticlockwise.

Using this setup I could receive and decode signals from a local packet test GM7RYR-10. I transmitted to the ISS packet digipeater but didn’t see any of my packets digipeated. However, I received my packets locally on my Yaesu FT60 and decoded them on a Raspberry Pi via Direwolf by WB2OSZ and Xastir.