Sorry, I can no longer resist jumping in here with my thoughts. To
make this somewhat on topic, my U3S is such a wonderful WSPR beacon!
It's running on LF right now. :-)
Running WSPR on LF overnight it is very obvious WSPRnet has rejected
many attempted spot uploads. On LF there are certain stations I know
for a fact decode me every period but often spots from those
stations didn't make it into the WSPRnet system. This always
coincides with times when the WSPRnet web site is extremely sluggish
or won't load at all. For a while last year I uploaded spots via a
different method, using a script. This allowed me to see when
uploads failed due to server timeouts, which was shockingly often.
The volume of spots processed by WSPRnet is a fraction of that
handled by PSK Reporter which doesn't seem to be having any issues.
I agree the usefulness of WSPR is declining due to these problems
with WSPRnet. This affects LF operators like myself deeply. We might
get just one spot from a given station or country once in a night,
once in a month, once in a year... but that one can be among those
WSPRnet rejects during its times of struggle. If you are actually
using WSPR to study propagation, missing data can be a real problem.
I don't think the intent of WSPR was only to see if propagation
supports a QSO, but... On LF we are using QSO modes which equal and
surpass the decoding capabilities of WSPR:
Perhaps if there were a large enough volume of requests to the
WSPRnet admins, this problem would be addressed. Just a wild
thought. There is some interesting and revealing insight in the
WSPRnet forums for those willing to dig deep enough to find it.
73,
Paul N1BUG
N1BUG