Revisiting my spotviz.info webapp: visualizing WSJT-X FT8 spots over time – part 5: MongoDB Aggregate Queries

Now I have my http://www.spotviz.info app up and running with some collected spot data for testing, one of the first things I want to enhance is the date range selection for visualization, and specifically, adding more data to the heatmap to help you pick a good date range with available data.

The heatmap display I originally added gives you a visual representation of which days have data to view, but it doesn’t help you pick a time range within that day where there’s data. Here’s what the heatmap looks like right now:

The darker the color the more data there is for that day. The problem as it is right now though is that say for one day you ran WSJT-X for 1 hour between 1pm and 2pm and received spots from 2000 stations. Without knowing that there’s only data between 1pm and 2pm, you could select a range of 9am to 6pm for playback, and you’d get nothing displayed on the map until it animated through the 1pm to 2pm block and then a gap of nothing again.

My first enhancement here is to show the earliest and latest signal received times for a given day, to help you pick a good range.

The original MongoDB query (which I discussed here) retrieves a count of spots per hour for a given day:

db.Spot.aggregate( [   
   {$match: {spotter: "kk6dct"}},
   {"$group": {
     "_id": {
       "$subtract": [
         { "$subtract": [ "$spotReceivedTimestamp", new Date("1970-01-01") ] },
         { "$mod": [ { "$subtract": [ "$spotReceivedTimestamp", new Date("1970-01-01") ] }, 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 ] }
       ]
     },
     count:{$sum: 1 }
   }
 }
])

There’s only one calculated value returned in the results in this query, count, but in order get the earliest and latest spots per day, this is a simple as adding two more calculated values following the return of

count : { $sum : 1 }

so the last part of the query is now:

    count : { $sum : 1 },
    "firstSpot" : { "$min" : "$spotReceivedTimestamp" },
    "lastSpot" : { "$max" : "$spotReceivedTimestamp" },

Done!