[Dxspider-support] [quiet announce] US state filtering

[Dirk Koopman]

In the latest build in CVS I have put in an alpha version of US State
filtering. The build you require is 57.119. 

This is not for the faint of heart and if you haven't upgraded recently,
I would hold off upgrading from CVS for a few days whilst I sort out the
mess I have created sticking this in. 

That is, unless this is a feature that is important to you *and* you
fancy having a play.

Anyway, this is what it does:

* In the US, many Amateurs want to receive spots from just their local
  area, their state or callzone. This is not a common requirement in EU
  but is important there.

* It has become possible to obtain detailed licencing info from the FCC
  which (after some radical surgery) enables me to determine which City
  and State any licenced Amateur (no 'Licence details withheld' there!)
  lives. It is necessary to use this database because callzones are not
  small enough + the US now has 'vanity calls' which may be out of zone.

* I shall be introducing weekly updates (as they are provided by the 
  FCC) as well. This will start to happen automatically when I have got 
  the basic software working to most people's satisfaction.

* This database, although it may be added to later, is *not*, nor will
  it ever be, a substitute for sh/qrz et al. Its sole purpose is to 
  facilitate finer graded filtering and better realtime DXing
  information and tracking. The information held is no finer than 
  City and State. A QRA locator and County information + non US 
  information that allows this mechanism to be used elsewhere, may be
  added later. 

* You can now filter spots, announces and routes 'by_state'
  (eg acc/spot  by_state va,ri,nh,me,ma) using this database with, I
  believe, minimal  impact on performance (although Charlie K1XX is in
  charge of proving  me wrong here). 

* If you don't install the following stuff, your node will continue to 
  work and any 'by_state' filtering will be ignored. Don't install it 
  unless you need it or want to play.

* To install:-

1. get the latest CVS build 57.119 (or better).
2. download http://www.dxcluster.org/download/usdbraw.gz somewhere (eg
   /tmp), it is ~5Mb.
3. uncompress it using your favorite program (gunzip or winzip [call it
   usdbraw]).
4. Go to /spider/perl and run: create_usdb.pl /tmp/usdbraw (or whatever
   you have called it). 
5. Wait for a while. It may take several minutes on a slow processor or
   on a machine with insufficient RAM (took about 2 minutes on my 300Mhz
   K6 Windows box).
6. Restart the node, you should see a line saying 'US Database loaded'
   flash past as it restarts. 

This is known to work as well under Windows as it does under Linux
(whatever that means), alter the instructions above in the usual way to
suit.

That's it.

Please send all your requests and complaints to this mailing list so we
can all see the issues.

Dirk G1TLH