A bit about me and Linux
I am an Englishman who has spent most of his adult life working in other countries. I have been living in Vienna, Austria since 1998 but that is all another story. This blog is (mainly) about Ubuntu, so here I will simply explain how I came to be an Ubuntu enthusiast.
When I first moved to Vienna I happened to buy a book called “Linux for Dummies” which contained an installation CD for SuSE Linux 5.3. This was my first introduction to Linux and I have never looked back.
I faithfully remained a SuSE aficionado until SuSE -10 when Novell took over and totally wrecked the backup system I had been using for years (I was using Mondo by Hugo Rabson). Dispite several emails to Novell they never had the courtesy to reply, so in 2005 I moved to Fedora Core 4. Fedora Core is an excellent distibution and I found many things to be much easier than with SuSE. It was only after reading an article in Linux Magazine about Ubuntu that I decided to install Ubuntu on a second partition and try it out. I was absolutely smitten! Every thing just works and the few problems I have had have been quickly resolved by searching the Ubuntu Forums
All I want to do on this blog is to offer links to some of the Ubuntu resources that I find useful, some tips, tricks and tweaks I have found out about and to blog any “problems ” I have encountered while playing around with Ubuntu, together with the solutions I used to solve the problems.
I just hope that the blog will be useful to someone 
Well your blog is certainly useful to me!
Steve
Just located your magnificent Distance and Bearing calculator using Google Maps.
Firstly congratulations and thanks for your wonderful work. Your programme and your website are a credit to yourself and I believe Barbara who like my wife is very tolerant of my electronic interests.
I am a Amateur Radio who has a station in a country area and all my VHF communications involve long distances. Just testing some new high gain antennas and have been communicating with VHF stations and repeaters at long distances from my location.
As you would know Distance and Bearings are very important and your solution is much better than either manual calculations or some software solutions.
May I suggest
(a) you make your Distance and Bearing calculator available from a simple web address rather than the link and pop up through the microwave page?
(b) would it be possible to click and drag either Site B or even both Site A and B. In my case I would like to be able to drag Site B to check out various repeater sites or even individual locations when the bands “open”.
Any comments would be appreciated to my email address.
Regards
Ray VK2BRF
Hi Ray,
Thanks for the comments. It is always nice to know that your work is appreciated
Regarding your suggestions. Actually the Distance and Bearing calculator you are using is old and evolved into the microwave tool, I am a microwave network planning engineer by the way. The microwave tool allows you to input the coordinates for a marker (above the map) or click to set a marker and the distance and bearing are shown on the right of the map. You can simply ignore the other stuff if you don’t need it. I used different controls for this map, you can zoom in and out with the mouse which you can’t with the version you are using but I replaced the usual Google maps control with a magnifying glass, maybe you don’t like that. Let me know, it is simple to revert to the standard controls. Regarding dragging the marker, this is easy to implement but I am using the eventListener (javascript jargon for waiting for a click) to display the rings.
I will probably make a cut down version of the microwave planner as a distance and bearing calculator with dragable markers and replace the existing one with it. So now is the time to tell me what other features you would like, for instance free space loss for specific frequency ranges. Shouls I use the standard controls? Maybe we should switch these comments to the “Gmaps. Coordinates, Bearing and Distance Calculator” section on my blog. Also there are instructions for using the tool in the blog under “Microwave link engineering with Google Maps”
Cheers,
Steve.