The DX Cluster data seems incomplete. I'm looking at node WA9PIE and searching http://dxdisplay.caps.ua.edu/Search with different results. Seems to be way more traffic on WA9PIE.
The trends I find valuable that could be incorporated are: On each band at what time can Country A hear Country B ? These values would then create a a time span that would be an indication of the duration of an opening. The average new ham believes that these openings are short due to their smaller and lower antennas and feel lucky to be there, while the experienced HF operator knows that the bands are usually open from sunrise-to-sunset or from sunset-to-sunrise. Bug guns know that the openings for them can start earlier and will last longer because of their higher performance antennas. Another threshold that could be found is by comparing these opening durations to the solar indices to determine the level at which there are no spots / reports to that country on a certain band. It's all about finding the limits, then knowing them and applying them to your operating. Contest weekends impact this analysis significantly, but by eliminating them from the data search or analysis would cause you to lose the intensity of the data that's generated on some of the most active weekends of the year. i.e. CQ WW DX SSB and CQ WW DX CW. You would also lose the "focused" data that would be generated by regional contest like ARRL DX CW and ARRL DX SSB, WAE, RDXC, All-Asian, Oceania DX, etc. or the many single nation contests i.e. SP-DX, WAG et al. There's also the monoband focused contests on 160M, 10M and 6M that would yield good single weekend data on those bands. A clearer picture of "average daily DXing" would exclude weekends, though the weekend starts earlier for the east and ends later in the west. Adding these types of searches or custom searches can yield even more useful details. The same can be applied to the recent work with beaconing WSPR stations which gather lots of reports from and by stations with minimal antennas. As these WSPR stations become more common and are applied to by more average ham's with established or high performance antennas, then we will be able to gather an excellent data set. This is intended as food for thought since you already have all the data and the ability to analyze it.
Thanks for the tip, I will look at WA9PIE. I can collect data from multiple cluster nodes, as the software has the ability to recognize dupes and record them only once. Also, will be looking at WSPRNet data (there is such a large volume of spots there that I would only want to get a sampling of it, rather than duplicating the WSPRNet database).
Yeah whom ever got the stupid idea to blend computers with radio was and is crazy,. radio is radio and computers and networks are a different animal. Old school is always the way to go, stop with the echolink and all the other stuff that runs over a wire network, radio should stay over air waves only. Wish I could turn back time to the 40's or 50's and stop computers from becoming a thing. They have made the world a worse place then it ever was.
Thanks sharing this... excellent, useful and well done! Off radio topic question (more of a survey question); What development environment/frameworks did you use for the web front end? Cheers! 73, Tom KC9PHX
I see a G1 call in that list who spotted over 10.ooo respots (Dupes).uses the DX Cluster as his logbook.
Service Unavailable HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable. Hope it will be back soon. great work.
Data and fact, just good stuff. Well done! With the eventual comodization of HAM radios, similiar but slower than the evolution of computers and iDivices, the understanding of the science and art of propagation is that last frontier you can't package it up and sell to make you a better HAM. And it is fun, too! We all look at the data and trends through different lenses. One graph, '20m, Band Utilaization', really struck me. The data is blatant, there are significant blocks of under utilized bandwidth on a freq. band we consider over crowded. It's not crowded, its very inefficiently being utilized. I could give my view points why its under utilized but I do not wish to start a fire storm either Great job and article, thanks for sharing with us.
Nice Job, Bill! See you at Dayton. Going to take me some time to digest this information.. wo4v, Boog
This website is coded using C# and Microsoft Visual Studio; charts are by highcharts.com . -73- AB4EJ
Sorry about that; I think I have it working again. Looks like some security was tightened down over weekend and the UID I was using for the Application Pool is locked. I will look further into that..... thanks for the heads up, and sorry it took me so long to respond, I was out of town this week without internet.
