CW Club RBN Spotter info

The table on the bandmap page shows recent RBN spots of CW club members in a dynamically updated bandmap (30 seconds update interval).

In the upper part of the page, you can specify the filter options you wish to apply. The lower part of the page shows the bandmap with the matching spots.

Some details:

• New spots (less than 2 minutes old) appear with a red background, old spots (10 minutes or older) with gray background.
• In the call filter, you can use ? and * as wildcard characters. A ? matches exactly one character, a * matches zero or more characters. E.g. VK* will show all matches from Australia. W?FOC will match W1FOC, W2FOC, etc. but not W75FOC.
• In case a call is spotted by multiple skimmers, and these skimmers report dissimilar WPM speeds, the lowest and highest reported speed are listed, separated by a hyphen.
• The font color of the receiving skimmer's callsign depends on the SNR: SNR > 50 dB, SNR > 40 dB, SNR > 30 dB, SNR > 20 dB, SNR > 10 dB, SNR > 0 dB. Hover your mouse over a spotter call to see the exact value.
• If you enter your own call and check the 'Include self-spots' box, your self-spots will be shown along with the other spots, with a green background. In order for this feature to work, you must be a member of at least one of the CW clubs. For your self-spots only, all your filter settings - except 'Bands' and 'Max spot age' - will be ignored. This means you will see your self-spots regardless of which filtering you've selected for clubs, speeds, call filter, and skimmer continents.
• Alerts (see below) are shown with a yellow background

Do spots of your station not appear in this RBN application?

• First, please check at www.reversebeacon.net if your signals were spotted at all.
• Second, if you've recently joined a club, your membership may not have been included in the membership list of that club. Please check with the club membership secretary.
• Please note that I do not maintain any membership lists myself; I only import lists that are maintained by the respective club membership secreataries at regular intervals (see list of updates below).

Don't you see any spots at all?

• First, please look at the filters you have defined. Maybe they are set too narrow?
• Did you enter a callsign in the "Own Call" box? If you wish to stay anonymous, just enter anything here.
• Also, please check at www.reversebeacon.net if the RBN site is up and running at all.

Alerting

• You can enter any number of callsigns, separated by spaces, in the Alert field. If one of these calls is spotted, it will be marked in yellow on the bandmap.
• Even calls that are not members of the selected clubs (if any) will be shown in the bandmap
• It is possible to limit the alerts by frequency by adding the range in parenthesis behind the call (without a space). Examples:
  • DJ5CW(3500-10150) - will only raise an alert for DJ5CW on 80m through 30m
  • SO5CW(1810-1840,7000-7040,18068-18168) - will only raise an alert for SO5CW on 160m, 40m and 17m in the specified ranges
• By checking the "Visual alert" box, you will receive a browser notification and the title of the site will flash for a few seconds to indicate there's an alert
• By checking the "Audio alert" box, you will receive an alert in Morse code, announcing the call(s) that were spotted

Award specific alerting

The CW Club RBN spotter can display alerts for various operating awards/activities of FOC and CWops, by retrieving an user's list of needed callsigns/bands from the respective Award Tools (FOC Award Tools, CWops Award Tools).

If you're a member of either club and already upload your logs to the award tools, you can immediately be notified of new spots which are valid for the various operating awards by selecting the respetive checkboxes in the filter tab.

You can refer to this screenshot: 1. Enter your own callsign, 2. Select the desired awards for which you want to be alerted, 3. Hit the "Refresh" symbol to load your needed callsign lists from the CWops/FOC Award Tools.

There are two display options: By default, spots that are new points for awards will be shown in yellow on the normal bandmap. You can also remove all other spots if you activate the checkbox "Show only needed stations on bandmap". If you hover your mouse cursor over the spot, a small popup will show for which award the spot counts.

The award functions are currently only available on the web interface. The same function will eventually also be implemented for the telnet interface.

Note: If you want to suppress certain alerted calls, you can add them into your alert list with an exclamation mark in front of them, e.g. !DJ5CW will mean no alerts will be generated for DJ5CW. To complete remove a call from the bandmap, prepend a tilde, e.g. ~DJ5CW.

Connect via telnet

You can receive the spots via telnet by connecting to rbn.telegraphy.de on port 7000. Filtering by club, continent (including "custom" skimmer selections), band and speed is implemented for the telnet port, as well as the block list (calls with a ~ in the alert box). Award filters are not yet available. Any changes you make to your filters here on the website automatically applies to the telnet port. If you need multiple sets of filters, simply use SSIDs like DJ5CW-1, DJ5CW-2 and log in accordingly. If you think that additional filters could be helpful, let me know!

You can switch between the telnet stream filtered by club members and a raw stream (all spots) by entering set/clubs and set/raw respectively.

If you want to reduce the spot load, issue the command set/nodupes. If enabled, only one spot per callsign on the same frequency will be posted in a 5 minute window. To switch back to all spots, enter set/dupes.

Ham Radio Deluxe users: If you don't see any spots, please try switching to the VE7CC output format (CC11) by entering set/ve7cc. You can switch back with set/normal

Embedding into your own website

It is possible to include a bandmap (possibly adjusted to your own needs) on your own website, e.g. a club website (example: UFT). If you need this, feel free to contact Fabian, DJ5CW and discuss the technical details.

About

This page was created by Fabian, DJ5CW and Frank, PA4N.
As of November 2018, Fabian took over the maintenance, further development and hosting of the CW Club Spotter. Adam, SQ9S takes care of the activity calendar. You can find the source code here: https://git.fkurz.net/dj1yfk/cwclubspotter/

Current users: 84 (web), 13 (telnet)

Comments are welcome via email - 73 de Fabian, DJ5CW (ex DJ1YFK) <fabian@fkurz.net>

Last updates of member lists

Most of the lists are updated automatically every day at 17:20 UTC. Those with an older update date are updated manually/on request only because no suitable list is available online.

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