This weekend I ran the QS1R SDR receiver with Skimmer Server software from
VE3NEA. This infrastructure can monitor CW QSOs on seven bands at once,
192khz on each band. Using the most rigorous filter settings, this
generated more than 187K spots, or more than one each second. Of course, at
certain periods the throughput was much higher than this average.
I am not a contester but I thought I might do some DXing using these spots.
But they came so fast and had so many spots for the big US and European
contest stations, it was a real challenge to find the few spots that were of
interest. SpotCollector, using the "Need" filter was the best tool I found
to deal with this. I need a faster computer for DXLab if I am going to do
this. My AMD Athlon 64 3200 box was running 100% CPU utilization even when
I frequently cleared the spot database. However none of my other DX
Cluster tools was able to reduce the torrent of spots to something useful.
(The QS1R is on its own machine.)
It was fun.
If you live in the Middle Atlantic states where your propagation would be
similar to mine, you are welcome to telnet into the CQ spot stream at
anytime at cw.wz7i.com, port 7300.
Wes, WZ7I
Pipersville, PA
FN20kj
