At the request of the moderator, after this, let's QSY this conversation
to Skimmertalk@contesting.com. It is a very low volume reflector, and
I'd encourage anyone interested in this subject to subscribe.
We decided at the outset (Felipe, Nick and I) that the Reverse Beacon
Network should be voluntary, and that we would facilitate its growth,
but would not put ourselves in the position of censoring or disciplining
the network. First of all, we foresaw how impossible that would be. You
complain about some specific quality problems with a couple of Skimmers,
but ask yourself how you would like the task of filtering out bad calls
from a spot stream like last weekend, when over 3 million spots were
forwarded. Even if the people trying to do the job were 99.8 percent
accurate, there would inevitably be mistakes made and people hurt.
I stand by my recommendation that filtering be done at the client end
as well as at the individual Skimmers. N1MM Logger has had a bad
call/bad spotter blacklisting capability for a year, and improvements
are underway to make it even more convenient.
You seem to assume that we, through our two servers, somehow control the
output of the entire RBN. Many of our volunteers make their Skimmers
openly available (some have to, in order to comply with contest rules).
A number of DX cluster nodes now offer RBN spots, or spots collected
from a large number of individual Skimmers. VE7CC is probably the most
widely connected of these, but he's far from the only one. We welcome
this trend, because of the redundancy it provides, and the way it
spreads the word about the RBN.
We're glad to help users and RBN volunteers solve their technical
problems, and we will take a resolute stand against anyone who tries to
hack our servers, but we are really just a more-or-less transparent
facilitator for the work of the RBN's volunteers. That's how we like it,
and that's how it will remain.
73, Pete N4ZR
The World Contest Station Database, updated daily at www.conteststations.com
The Reverse Beacon Network at http://reversebeacon.net, blog at
reversebeacon.blogspot.com,
spots at telnet.reversebeacon.net, port 7000 AND now
at arcluster.reversebeacon.net port 7000
On 12/2/2011 6:27 AM, Barry N1EU wrote:
> Appreciate the comments and your hard work Pete, but I just don't get it.
>
> I posted one screenshot showing some obviously bad flaws in the
> system, and it's hard to accept that things can't be made better than
> that. There's no reason it has to be democratic - if you send bad
> spots (don't follow the rules), you should get cut off from sending
> spots to the RBN system.
>
> It might be enlightening to do some quality control analysis - is
> there a super computer somewhere that could run all the spots dumped
> into the system during the contest against the callsign database and
> look at the list of spots that don't validate, i.e., what percentage
> are bogus, how the skimmer nodes each performed, etc?
>
> Taking the time during a contest to add bad spots to a logging program
> list is out of the question. It already takes too much time to just
> delete them individually and having a long bad list isn't going to
> help cpu loading either.
>
> Perhaps the solution is to somehow recognize the skimmers that ARE
> doing the validation and not sending the bad spots and somehow filter
> out the spots coming from the other skimmers. But I don't know of a
> way to do this, other than simply telnet into a single known good
> skimmer if that's possible.
>
> 73, Barry N1EU
>
> On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Pete Smith<n4zr@contesting.com> wrote:
>> As always, thanks for your comments, Barry.
>>
>> Keep in mind that the RBN is a network of ~70 simultaneous volunteers,
>> all over the world. CW Skimmer and Skimmer Server both have bad call
>> lists built in. If 50 nodes have LW3LPL or RK3LR blocked, and 20 do
>> not, then the bum spots will still appear.
>>
>> We believe it makes better sense for users to implement their own
>> filters. For example, N1MM Logger has both bad call and bad spotter
>> lists that can be fed from the bandmap's right-click menu. A contest or
>> two and all those RF-caused busts can be history. We're pretty well
>> convinced that validation against a master.dta file is *not* the answer.
>>
>> The problem of callers being spotted as if they were running is
>> well-known, but Alex has so far not been able to come up with a better
>> solution than that which is currently implemented. I just keep an eye
>> on the bandmap, and ignore stations that appear in zero beat with
>> someone I've recently worked. A short bandmap timeout also helps.
>>
>> 73, Pete N4ZR
>>
>> The World Contest Station Database, updated daily at www.conteststations.com
>> The Reverse Beacon Network at http://reversebeacon.net, blog at
>> reversebeacon.blogspot.com,
>> spots at telnet.reversebeacon.net, port 7000 AND now
>> at arcluster.reversebeacon.net port 7000
>>
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