[Skimmertalk] [RBN-OPS] false 6 meter spots

[N6EV - Paul Carreiro]

Hi Pete, et.al.
I would highly discourage RBN doing away with 
non-CQ spots on 6 meters.  Doing so would 
eliminate all beacon spots on the band.  And 
beacon spots are essential to early detection of sporadic-E openings.

As has been mentioned, the culprit in most of 
these false-spot situations is more often than 
not running normal mode vs. aggressive callsign 
validation with non-CQ calls passed.  And this 
almost always happens with an RBN node trying to 
run both HF bands and 6 Meters at the same 
time.   Unfortunately, the two (HF / VHF) have 
competing requirements.  HF needs normal 
validation with CQ only spots.  6 Meters needs 
aggressive validation with non-CQ spots 
passed.   I wish there was a way for the skimmer 
software to apply these attributes selectively 
based on HF vs 6 meters in these multi-band 
setups.   Until that capability appears, I would 
suggest such setups that continue to run 
multi-band with 6 meters run with normal callsign 
validation and CQ Only selected.  As stated 
above, unfortunately this would eliminate beacon 
spots, but their quality of spots on 6 would 
improve (i.e. false spots reduced).

I also run a single band 6 meter Softrock Enemble 
RX SDR.  So I'm not directly familiar with these 
multi-band setups.  Realizing that, is there a 
way to run multiple instances of Skimmer/Server 
and Aggregator on a single SDR, splitting HF and 
6 meters between the software?  That would allow 
applying the attributes above appropriately per band.

73
Paul N6EV
http://N6EV.com/


At 05:39 AM 7/7/2017, N4ZR n4zr at comcast.net [RBN-OPS] wrote:
><snip>
>Should we be re-thinking allowing non-CQ 6-meter 
>spots to be posted to the RBN?  What are the pros and cons?