WIRES Active Links Map

The Map

WIRES (Wide-Coverage Internet Repeater Enhancement System) is a system for linking repeaters over the Internet, so that you can talk to Hams around the world from a local repeater.

Vertex Standard runs the system and publishes updates every 10 minutes. This page reads their published data and puts it on a Google map. If you want to add these markers to your own mashup, please continue reading below the map.

The orange markers are from records that have no latitude and longitude reported from Vertex Standard's website, so I use Google to generate coordinates from the city. In keeping with Google's terms of service, the lookup requests are spaced out, so you don't look like a botnet attacking.

The gadget spec URL could not be found

Adding To Your Own Page

You are welcome to put this map on your page or even use the code to add these markers to an existing map you have. I'm making all of my code Public Domain.

Via Google Gadget

If you are using a page that supports Google gadgets, you can use the same gadget you see here. wires-google-gadget.xml

Via Javascript

In order to scrape the WIRES data from Vertex Standard, I have to use a PHP script on my server, reformat the data, and present a JSON or JSONP feed.

The JSON feed is available here: http://extras.k6rwh.org/wires/wires.php?display=json.

More useful would be the JSONP feed, since the feed won't be coming from your own domain name (unless you copy my PHP file). The way this works is that you create a <script> tag that points to my JSONP feed, and in the url you specify the name of a callback function you want called when the script is loaded. My PHP page then wraps the "traditional" JSON data in a function call to your callback function. The result is that when the data is loaded, you get a callback with the the JSON data as the argument to the callback.

Example

Here's how you can pull in the WIRES data into your code:

    <script src="http://extras.k6rwh.org/wires/wires.php?display=jsonp&callback=wiresLoaded"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    function wiresLoaded(json){
        alert('You received ' + json.records.length + ' records.');
    }
    </script>

Here's a tiny web page that puts a map up (try it—looks good on an iPhone too):

<html>
<head>
<title>WIRES Map Example</title>
<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=ABQ...won't work with my key anyway...p7LNg" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://extras.k6rwh.org/wires/wires.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    WIRES.setupMap('map_div');
</script>
</head>
<body>
    <div id="map_div" style="width:100%;height:100%"></div>
</body>
</html>

Download

These are the files in use:

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