[Cluster-tech] spider's DE length

[Dirk Koopman G1TLH]

Felipe

This is where I have a little rant, I apologise in advance.

<rant>
I am stuck between a rock and a hard place here. The format of the USER 
presentation is fixed - period, unless something radical in bloody 
stupid spot scraping software has changed that is, I am afraid, how it 
is going to stay.

You have NO IDEA how much grief I got when I first started out on this 
(over 10 years ago) because the USER presentation was not *exactly* the 
same as AK1A.

-# is, as far as I am concerned, invalid. I suspect that, for many 
logging programs, that is also true. I can tell you now that if I 
allowed the field to expand (an obvious and very easy mod), several 
logging programs would fail, because they expect the data to appear in 
*fixed* character positions.

This is because the authors either don't have a clue or (perhaps) the 
tools to parse the data in a more flexible way. There are actually 
fairly simple regexes that could get the data out from this crummy 
format (for computers), but a lot of authors don't either know or 
understand about this.
</rant>

I fundamentally disagree that -# is useful or desirable. I will filter 
it out in future releases. If N1MM et al want to distinguish between a 
robot spot then they can do that, very easily, by looking at the comment 
section. Can I also point out that the network is already full of spot 
suckers, web clusters and other specialist robots and they do not cause 
this sort of problem.

Has *anyone* considered the consequences of several people running this 
software - all over the world - during CQWW (or any other large contest)?

As I understand it, whilst DXSpider seems to cope OK, other dxcluster 
node software is (already) having quite a bit of difficulty keeping up. 
Also it potentially causes a quantum leap in the level of protocol 
traffic - which sysops will have to pay for.

YMMV

73 Dirk G1TLH

Felipe Ceglia - PY1NB wrote:
> Hi Dirk,
> 
> First, sorry, the DE info is being cropped at 7 chars...
> 
> The actual scenario is that we are feeding an isolate node, 
> k4td.com:7300, with spots coming from the reverse beacon network.
> 
> Those spots come tagged as callsign-# so, for example, VE2WU-#, being 7 
> char in length is cropped as: VE2WU-# (the ":" is missing, see below). 
> Some logging programs are rejecting these spots, most likely because the 
> missing ":" .
> 
> DX de K4TD-#:    14044.9  K2LP    RBN 23 dB  25 WPM  CQ <K4TD-0  1245Z
> DX de N4ZR-#:    14045.0  K2LP    RBN 15 dB  22 WPM  CQ <K4TD-0  1246Z
> DX de VE2WU-#    14027.4  K2ETS   RBN 16 dB  20 WPM  CQ <K4TD-0  1247Z
> 
> I am looking for a way to fit the string on it, keeping the #.
> It would be important to keep the #, because it lets software like N1MM 
> tag spots which have been generated by robots.
> 
> 73 TU,
> 
> Felipe
> 
> Dirk Koopman G1TLH wrote:
>> Felipe Ceglia - PY1NB wrote:
>>> Hello folks,
>>>
>>> Our spider cluster is cropping the DE callsigns on spots to a maximum of
>>> 6 chars. Is there a way to raise that limit, or should the code be
>>> tweaked directly?
>>>
>>
>> Please can you give some examples from the debug file. I would like an 
>> example of what comes in and the resultant output.
>>
>> This is a limit for certain operations (dupe checking and such) but 
>> the actual spotted called length is 20 characters (from memory).
>>
>> There are restrictions on callsign, but they are to do with format, 
>> rather than length.
>>
>> Dirk G1TLH
>>
>