[Dxspider-support] Skimmers

[Brendan Minish]

On 20/03/2011 17:59, Dirk Koopman G1TLH wrote:

> I'd like to know the answer to this as well. I certainly have not seen
> the level of CW spots that Brendan suggests occurs during contest (or
> even just on a "good" day).

Hello Dirk

I was going to be emailing you about this anyway ;-)
The RBN skimmer spots all originate from the callsign of the skimmer 
owner but with the extension -#
the Dxskimmer server which us users run exports them like this

So if you log into the RBN's Dxspider node you see all the spots looking 
like this
  DX de W3UA-#:      14020.0  EB3DYS       03 dB  20 WPM  CQ 
  1804Z
DX de OE3DIA-#:    14020.1  EB3DYS       13 dB  20 WPM  CQ             1804Z
DX de RN4WA-#:     14020.1  EB3DYS       09 dB  20 WPM  CQ             1804Z
DX de LA5EKA-#:    14020.1  EB3DYS       16 dB  20 WPM  CQ             1804Z


I have been talking with the RNB guys and we tried as an experiment 
peering a test instance of Dxspider here with their node but we could 
not pass skimmer spots, we think this is because the protocols between 
Dxspider nodes will not pass on these spots since the -# is parsed as 
invalid in some way (which it probably is for the normal network.
Our user generated test spots passed just fine

Rather than myself butchering your code in deeply inelegant ways, might 
you consider adding support for this in the intra-node protocols.
Probably the cleanest way to do this is to create a couple more classes 
of peer nodes to that support this

something like
set/rbnspider xx0xx

Using these classes could also set up isolation appropriately so that 
traffic from the regular network would not be fed back to the RBN nodes 
and perhaps more importantly prevent any traffic from RBN being 
forwarded to the regular network

VE1CC has presumably also created some protocol extensions for his nodes 
that support this as he is requesting direct feeds from people who run 
skimmers.


The other issue that the RBN guys are seeing with dxspider is one of 
performance, Not too surprising I guess with 400K + spots on a busy day 
and 90 or more connected users, this will be harder to fix but 
multi-threading where practical might help a lot.
The chances are that the RBN system will have to scale a lot as more 
skimmers come on line and as it gains popularity

Dxspider is in many ways a good fit for them as it runs very nicely on 
linux and it's open source. A lot of their other back end software is 
also apparently written in perl too .


-- 
73
Brendan EI6IZ