Saturday, September 9, 2017

Been busy lately?

How much are you operating?

So are you working on your CW skills? How much are you on-the-air? Are you a casual operator or are you a CW-aholic?



There's a tool to help you track your on-air activity


The RBN (reverse beacon network) is a collection of reporting stations that run CW-Skimmers and report what they hear to the RBN network.  It is a very useful tool to see where your signal is going and how strong you're being heard.

The RBN stores a lot of data and makes it freely available.  One industrious amateur operator  Fabian Kurz, DJ1YFK operates a website that presents all manner of useful historical information based on RBN data.

By entering your callsign in the URL or using the entry box on the page you can see your activity by day with a "heat map" look.  Darker green means it heard your call more times that day.  You can inspect any individual day to see what bands you were operating and also when.
RBN activity tracker https://foc.dj1yfk.de/activity/W1AW

You can also use it to view other amateurs activity and determine what times of day and bands they prefer to operate on.


That will show you activity for W1AW but enter your own call-sign to see your information.   Now keep in mind that RBN only tracks you when you call CQ so if you operate mainly search and pounce (i.e. only answer others calls) you won't see a fair representation of your activity.

That's all for now...

So lower your power and raise your expectations

72/73
Richard AA4OO

1 comment:

  1. Great tool, thanks! It was nice to hear you on the dit dit podcast. I added a link to your blog on my blog page.

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