7-9 Spots a Minute During IARU

I'm happy to report that the Reverse Beacon Network made 312,867 spots
in the 34 hours of the IARU Contest.  On average, each active Reverse
Beacon was spotting 7-9 stations per minute.  We are working on
extracting numbers of spots of each WRTC station during the period, and
hope to have these later today.

73, Pete N4ZR

New RBN Feature Out for Beta Test During IARU Contest

The Reverse Beacon Network team is pleased to announce that a new and (we hope) exciting feature is being released for beta testing during and after the IARU Contest.

The Spot Analysis Tool, written by Nick Sinanis, F5VIH/SV3SJ, can now be found at http://reversebeacon.net/analysis . In a nutshell, it is intended to provide easily usable comparisons between multiple stations over an entire day at a glance. You can select a date and a Reverse Beacon station on any continent, then enter the callsign of a station, and in seconds all the spots of that station made by that Reverse Beacon are displayed graphically, with either Signal to Noise Ratio SNR) or frequency on the vertical axis, and the 24-hour time on the horizontal. Add another callsign, and spots of that station are superimposed on the first. Click the "i" icon at the upper right of the page for step-by-step instructions, if you need them.

If you select SNR, you will immediately be able to see which station opened the band to the area represented by the Reverse Beacon, which had the better signal during the middle of the opening, and which fared better in the waning hours. Select a time period and zoom in to get a close look at comparative signal strength. Selecting frequency to plot will show whether stations changed run frequencies often and which frequencies they were (or were not) able to hold, and when.

A few cautionary notes. This *is* an automated system. It only spots stations that it believes are CQing. The SNR for a given spot can be heavily influenced by QRM or QRN, so general trends are a lot more instructive than individual spots. If Slim decides to sign somebody else's call, and it's heard, it will be spotted, and the frequency calibration may vary (though we're working on that) depending on the Reverse Beacon's individual setup.

As we said, this is a beta test version. There are a few limitations right now - most important, it does not yet work with Internet Explorer, so you will need to use Firefox or Chrome to test it. While Nick is working on that problem, we'd like to get comments about the usability of the tool, reports on any bugs you encounter, and any other input you want to provide. While we're not averse to comments on CQ-Contest, you can avoid a glut there by sending your comments to us at skimmer@dxwatch.com.

We look forward to hearing from you!

73,

Nick, F5VIH/SV3SJ, Felipe PY1NB, and Pete, N4ZR

Twenty Times as Many Spots!

A very interesting talk on new technology in contesting was given last week at the Friedrichshafen hamfest in Germany by Tobi, DH1TW. It featured the Reverse Beacon Network, and contrasted the number of spots generated by RBN during the recent WPX CW contest with those delivered by the conventional spotting network. You can see it (in English) at hhttp://www.dh1tw.de/how-new-technologies-affect-the-art-of-contesting.

It's pretty breathtaking - the RBN delivered about 837,000 spots from 41 reverse beacons in 21 countries, while the conventional spotting network delivered less than 40,000. The RBN also collected two and one half times as many callsigns, and about 35 percent more total prefixes during the 48-hour contest. Not bad.

The RBN is very close to the perfect information tool for WPX, but it offers the same benefits in every contest - huge volume, no subjective "to spot or not to spot" judgments, and spot quality as high or higher than conventional DX clusters. Now, thanks to K4TD, you can even apply full filtering to the spot stream from the RBN. The Telnet server at telnet.reversebeacon.net port 7000 uses the DX Spider cluster server, and you can set it up to deliver a very high level of specificity - filtering out all spots except those from your own area, for example, or spotting only stations from Europe (WAE is coming, after all).

Stay tuned for a major announcement, coming soon - the RBN Signal Analysis Tool, developed by Nick, F5VIH/SV3SJ. It's in test now, and once a few last bugs are smoothed out, you'll see why Felipe and I are so excited about it.

73, Pete N4ZR

New RBN Aggregator Telnet Feed Available Now

The Reverse Beacon Network (http://reversebeacon.net) has now made a
Telnet feed of the aggregated output of all currently active RBN Skimmer
receivers available in real time at telnet.reversebeacon.net port 7000 (that's not a clickable link - you'll need a telnet client, though your logging software will work just fine).

Thanks to Rick, K4TD, for making the server available, and to Felipe,
PY1NB and Nick, F5VIH for the programming effort.

No big deal, you say? Well, before you blow it off, take a look at the
flow of spots, even on a normal weekday. Run them through appropriate
filters (CCUser, etc.) to remove duplicates, restrict spots to your country, continent, or call area, or whatever, and use them to populate the bandmap of your favorite contest logging software. I think you'll be amazed.

This feed offers one huge advantage for contesters, because the RBN
spots *every* station it hears, not just the ones that someone,
somewhere thinks are worthy of being spotted. It is also listening on
all bands, all the time, at world-wide sites.

ONE CAUTION -- Precisely because it spots everything, usually multiple
times, it would be disastrous if someone were to feed the RBN Telnet
server into the normal DX cluster network. If this happens, the server
may have to be shut down, so *please* don't do it.

73, Pete N4ZR

Load? What Load??

When I wrote the sad story of our server buckling under the load of the ARRL DX Contest, I'm sure people were curious about the quantitative story. Because of the problems that weekend, we don't have the numbers for it, but we do have them for the Russian DX Contest, which just finished.

As you can see, we went from a rate of around 50 spots per minute received at the RBN, in the time just before the contest started at 1200Z, to a peak of 600 spots per minute at 1400Z. There was a brief drop-out between 0300 and 0400Z due to problems with a backup routine, but then the flow of spots continued at a rate of 250-400 spots per minute until the end of the contest. At that point the server breathed a sigh of relief, as it dropped back to around 30 spots per minute.

For the 24 hours of the contest, the database received 545,747 spots. Our guesstimate is that a major contest such as CQWW or the ARRL DX Test, with their much larger number of participants, would yield at least twice the spot rate. The programming team has done a lot of good preliminary work, to stabilize things at the current level, but the effort continues. The next big test will be the WPXCW at the end of May.\

73, Pete Smith N4ZR

Tell us what you'd like in the database search interface.

While Felipe and Nick are doing the real work, I'm inspired to try to stimulate some interest by raising some ideas about improving the user interface for the Reverse Beacon Network database.

It might be possible for there to be a single interface for all searches. Alternatively, there may be good reasons, such as simplicity, to break it into multiple forms, depending on the purpose. What I'm trying to do here is suggest some things that it would be good to keep in mind for various fields:

For example:

DE should provide for specifying a variety of different limiters - they might include the specific callsign(s) of the spotters as well as countries and ITU zones. Multiple callsigns or countries should be accommodated.

DX should have the same range of possibilities.

Any Date field should allow for date ranges as well as single dates

The Signal Comparison Tool should, if at all possible, only offer Skimmer sites that have data relating to the comparison that is being run. As it stands now, when you specify a date, the next step in the tool gives you a list of Skimmers active on that date, but many will not have data for the stations or bands of interest for any given search. It would be great if the skimmers could be offered for selection based both on the band and on the stations to be compared, but I realize that may be too burdensome; even just the bands would be a step forward.

What would YOU like to see?

73, Pete N4ZR

Progress Report

Since I last wrote, Felipe, PY1NB and Nick, F5VIH, have been hard at work putting together a development environment that they (hopefully joined by other contributors as well) can use to develop better software for the RBN site. Stay tuned for more details on that in the coming days, including an invitation to participate.

In the meantime, they have made some changes in the current software that should, we hope, make it better able to handle heavy loading. The Russian contest, coming up next weekend, should provide a good first test.