[Skimmertalk] Skimmer in CQWW and CPU Utilization Problem

[W3OA]

Hi Steve -

Thank you for the suggestion.  I'm anxious to try that during a big 
contest.  I'm wondering how often I should switch areas of the band?

Dick

Steve Lott wrote:
> Dick,
>
> One option is to narrow the band width and use Skimmer Schedule to 
> change areas (by bandwidth) looked at
> throughout the contest
> with skimmer schedule from http://www.wd5eae.org/
>
> 73
> steve
> KG5VK
>
> On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 8:20 AM, W3OA <w3oa at roadrunner.com 
> <mailto:w3oa at roadrunner.com>> wrote:
>
>     I ran a Skimmer for 48 hours during CQWW and I think it was a great
>     success.  My score and number of q's went up 15 percent over last year
>     for the same number of hours worked.
>
>     The SDR was a Softrock Lite+Xtall version 8.3.  The antenna connection
>     was from the Mark-V Rx Antenna Out jack.  I used a relay to cut the
>     audio connection between the Softrock and the sound card to prevent a
>     lot of false signals in the waterfall while I was transmitting.
>
>     I had Skimmer set for 96 kHz sampling rate, Do not send callsigns
>     without "CQ", and Paranoid validation.  The Master.dta file was one I
>     had modified to remove all the US calls.  Thus the only spots sent out
>     were for "counters" that were participants in previous contests.
>      I used
>     Wintelnetx to combine Skimmer spots with spots from a Cluster node.
>     These were fed into a simple chat server program to allow other
>     Carolina
>     DX Association users to see the combined spot stream via a telnet
>     connection.  My local display was the N1MM bandmap.
>
>     Skimmer was on a dedicated computer, a 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 with 2
>     gigs of
>     RAM.  I noticed a couple of times (like the bottom 96 kHz of 40 during
>     the first hour and 20 on Saturday morning) the CPU utilization was
>     bouncing up to 100 percent and "Decoders" showed something like 600 of
>     1000 or 500 of 1300.  During these times the number of spots put out
>     seemed to drop dramatically.  I wonder if this is normal
>     operation?  I'm
>     thinking a way to get around this is to use 48 kHz sampling rate and
>     switch between band segments every so often, maybe ever 5 minutes.
>      I'd
>     appreciate hearing comments from others on this.
>
>     73 - Dick, W3OA
>
>
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