New free web page showing all(*) band live statistics on one page

A single web page showing what bands are active, who's reaching whom, what modes are being used and a lot more info. Available at https://g1ojs.github.io/BandOpticon/BandOpticon.


Hi,

This idea started because I wanted an easy way to compare the spots I'm getting and giving, with those of other callsigns in my area.

Over the last week or so this has developed into a Javascript web page on my GitHub that live-updates with lots of information about the current state of the bands, including who's spotting whom, which squares are being reached/heard, which bands are active, what modes are being used etc, all drawn from live Pskreporter data.

I'd like others to find this useful, so here's the link:

The readme page: https://g1ojs.github.io/BandOpticon/
The current live web page: https://g1ojs.github.io/BandOpticon/BandOpticon

Hope you find it useful!

73
Alan G1OJS

 

Very nice, will play with this a bit.

 

Alan, I’m finding this to be really useful, thank you for the work. It answers a lot of questions.

 

Thanks Perry, that's really good to hear - especially as at the moment I'm struggling to get people to look at it! I'm still updating the page with new features almost daily so it's worth checking back - but I think it's 'almost finished' now.

I'm certainly noticing things from it that I couldn't find out any other way - like quite how prevalent some of the modes I didn't know about are, and what bands they tend to get used on.

I'm really pleased with it too, as my Javascript coding is all self taught.
73
Alan

 

I once ran a publishing company, and we were featured in a *front page* long-form article in the NY Times, the article was the entire bottom half of Page 1 with a photo and jumped inside for another 2+ pages, with photos. I spent months with the reporter on the story, they sent out photographers all over the country to get shots, it was quite the deal. I doubled our server capacity in anticipation of the flood of new traffic in the month leading up to publication. The day came. Front page, Sunday NY Times. Crickets. We got pretty much no additional business from what had to be the best advertising I would ever field.

What I've learned most from Bandopticon is how crappy my antenna is! Looking at the list of what others in my grid are hearing and comparing it to what I'm hearing is...disappointing.

A question: When I'm looking at this display:



what is the difference between the W1GRD view and the W1GRD ONLY view? I'm interpreting it as W1GRD + Gridmates vs. just W1GRD being heard.

 

That's what set me off looking at the Pskreporter mqtt feed - to see if I could see what others are receiving and compare to mine. I was spending a lot of time on 2m FT8 at the time and my antennas are fairly minimal.

Yes that's right, except the top row is all the *other* gridmates (i.e. not W1GRD). Row by row:
Other calls in 'home' transmitting, and being received by ... those callsigns
Other calls in home receiving .... those transmitters
W1GRD transmitting and being received by ... those callsigns
W1GRD transmitting, and the callsigns receiving W1GRD but nobody else from 'home'

The way I have it at the moment, callsigns receiving or being heard by W1GRD are underlined and bold in all rows. So in the top row you're being heard by the first four calls that are also hearing others. In the bottom two rows, two of the calls hearing you are also in 'home' (blue ones).

If/when it happens, there can be two similar rows where your call will appear in green and show 1) the stations you're receiving, and 2) the stations only you are receiving.

I might need to update the words in black above that grid to
"Entities common to ... and the other callsigns in home are highlighted"
That sentence was correct in a prior version but it isn't quite right now. Arguably the highlighting also doesn't add anything helpful in the bottom two rows so I might take that out.

Flipping between this view and the "list all calls" view is sometimes helpful.

73
Alan

 

Thanks, that helps. I read the arrow as 'is being heard by' it helps quite a bit. My setup probably isn't one where I'd see many 'only' stations, but I can see how that would be an interesting piece of information.

In the third line, KB1EVH is blue because they are in my home grid and are underlined because they are hearing me. Getting it!

 

One thing I just learned is that Europeans like 160m FT8!

 

Alan, a thought. It'd be useful to see the intersection of 'heard by W1GRD' and 'has heard W1GRD', which would be the subset of stations that I'd have a god chance of contacting. Maybe below the other two.

An interesting metric to display would be a comparison of 'performance' between my station and the other stations in my home grid. Am I consistently worse than my peers? Better? Something like heard/hearing ratios.

[edit] I just realized that you are already showing the intersection, now it's highlighted better and I can pick them out...

 

Interesting thoughts & all that aligns exactly with why I set off on this journey.

Early on I found that a lower-than-you'd-think portion of the other calls are both being spotted and spotting others, from anywhere. At one point I categorised the home callsigns as "transmitting", "receiving", and "transmitting and receiving" and it wouldn't be uncommon to see numbers (at least on 2m) like 10, 5 and 2 in those categories. And to tighten that last category to "being spotted by and spotting the same DX call" would often make that last number 1 or 0.

The highlighting at the moment shows remote entities (squares or callsigns) being both a) reached by other home callsigns and b) reached by My Callsign, and as a separate calculation, remote entities (squares or callsigns) being both a) spotted by home callsigns and b) spotted by My Callsign. So it's not showing exactly what you mentioned at the moment.

Sometimes I switch the view to "list every call" and mentally scan the list to make the sort of comparisons you suggested. It's relatively easy to see if you're winning, or doing really badly. But the middle ground is tricky and as you said a metric is something that comes to mind to help there. As always, the trick is to come up with a metric that's simple enough to understand and visualise, but complicated enough to provide some additional insight, and I haven't imagined one yet.

I've also thought of adding in a way to pick one other station to compare yourself with, again for this kind of benchmark. This could be tried out with the current versions easily by editing the home grid to a single square containing only one home call to benchmark against .....

Well that was a long way of saying "Hmmmmm...." !

 

Update - check out https://g1ojs.github.io/BandOpticon/Versions/BandOpticon V1.0.4 .... I've only just finished editing so will be testing for a bit before making it the current version, but it does at least some of what you were talking about ....

 

That's what I was looking for. I copied the list of "W1GRD reaching and spotting" into the alert box for FT8, and it highlighted those stations when they were calling CQ (or otherwise depending on the filter). That's really useful, I think. I can still fish, but when a 'Likely QSO' alerts against the list I can choose the easy contact if I want. The wording is a bit clearer, too.

 

It was especially helpful this afternoon on 6m where I could hear a lot of DX but a smaller subset could hear me. It helped eliminate clutter, since stations with a higher chance of a QSO were highlighted.

In some ways, that list, of potential two-way contacts, might the only thing most folks would want to see. If I had a feed for it I'd put it into a widget on my desktop and park it next to my Alerts dialog.

 

Another data point. I’m currently calling CQ on 30m, and the stations replying are all in the list W1GRD Reaching and Spotting.

 

That's an interesting thought. It's not something I had in mind when I set off doing this. What would you say is more useful (or are all?):
1. Knowing which callsigns you have reciprocal connectivity with
2. Knowing which squares you have reciprocal connectivity with (e.g. could be different callsigns in the remote square but still indicating favourable conditions).
3. Knowing one or both of the above for "gridmates"

Both the above can be seen with the current version (and the next one coming soon) but I'm wondering if a focussed utility or dedicated screen might be helpful.