[Skimmertalk] Notching out FT8 frequencies to reduce CPU load of RTTYSkimServ

Bob Wilson, N6TV n6tv at arrl.net
Fri Jun 15 18:30:25 EDT 2018


Clicking on the "Band scope" button in RTTY Skimmer Server reveals that
RTTY Skimmer creates a *lot* of "decoders" (yellow dots) as it attempts to
identify and process signals that it cannot possibly deal with.  This
wastes a lot of the CPU time.

To reduce the CPU load, I changed the RTTYSegment section of my
RTTYSkimServ.ini file to ignore most of the known FT8 frequencies between
80m and 15m where most of the activity seems to be (at present):

RttySegments=1800000-1820000,3520000-3571000,3577000-3600000,5330000-5407000,7020000-7071000,7077000-7100000,10130000-10132000,10139000-10150000,14060000-14071000,14077000-14150000,18109000-18115000,21060000-21071000,21077000-21150000,24910000-24930000,28060000-28150000,50250000-54000000

(Of course this statement must be on a  *single long line*; email programs
may show this statement as multiple lines due to line wrap).

The reduction in CPU utilization was immediate and noticeable.  My i7-7700
PC has a variable speed cooling fan, the higher the CPU utilization, the
louder the fan.  It's much quieter now, and I'm still decoding RTTY spots
just fine.

I'm not sure if I should remove these FT8 frequencies during RTTY contest
weekends.  Last time I checked, the FT8 guys were still going strong with
little if any RTTY contest activity in the FT8 frequencies, but I haven't
tried to analyze the raw data files to see how many RTTY spots were posted
to these FT8 frequencies that I'm now ignoring.

73,
Bob, N6TV


More information about the Skimmertalk mailing list