Installation of VOACAP under OSX

Voacap is a tool for “HF Propagation Prediction and Ionospheric Communications Analysis” (1). In the following article I describe the steps to take in order to install the software under OSX. 

VOACAP Online

Build & Installation of Voacap

For the installation of the voacap commandline tools you can follow the steps mentioned in (2). Nevertheless I show the essential commands here:

wget http://www.qsl.net/hz1jw/voacapl/downloads/voacapl-0.5.8.tar.gz

tar xzf voacapl-0.5.8.tar.gz  cd voacapl-0.5.8 ./configure

make

sudo make install

Copy the Basic Configuration & Example Files

If you are new to voacap it is useful to start with some example files. Voacap expects them in its standard directory ~/itshfbc. The files can be copied manually:

cp -rv /usr/local/share/voacapl/itshfbc ~/

Testing the Installation 

cd ~/itshfbc

First test: voacapl -s ~/itshfbc/ voacapx.dat

No output on screen? <= Ok :)

Something should be in this file:

cat run/voacapx.out 

Our second test is an area coverage analysis:

voacapl -s ~/itshfbc/ area calc default/default.voa

cat areadata/default/default.vg1 

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Further Reading

  1. voacap.com

  2. OSX Installation Instructions

  3. What is Voacap trying to tell me? (N6BV)