[Dxspider-support] Self-spotting and de-duplication

Tue Jan 28 22:23:27 GMT 2025

I will be interesting to see how big a tea cup we need to contain the storm. Like you Dirk – I suspect that the problem is smaller than some anticipate. Looking at self-spotting behaviour from big stations in ARRL events it was pretty constrained – but how much that was supressed by nodes silently (to the user at least) discarding self-spots and the wider network throttling the rate of display I don’t know. We’ll only see as it gets more widely enabled. 

>From a contester’s perspective, I’m currently of the opinion that every 5 mins is probably too often (balance of useful spots vs. irritating some casual callers) – though if you set your contest logging software up to do it automatically – that maybe what you end up with. But I won’t be doing that – at least for now - unless everyone else does it and I can see I’m losing out from not doing so. I did have all this enabled for the RSGB 80m / 40m AFS contests and did the self-spotting manually – but probably not often enough. 

I recognise that some users (as opposed to contesters) don’t want a firehose of spots so they can see the wood from the trees so they may not appreciate a torrent of self spots. Similarly, I often turn off skimmer spots when not contesting so that I manually see a more curated set of spots of higher value. But – spots make a huge difference when first showing up on a new band on SSB – especially if you are not a big gun. Until you get spotted the rate can be close to zero – so that’s the driver for some self-spotting being allowed. 

BTW – the one parameter which I think it is important to change from a broader perspective (not just self spotting) is the min QSY to be re-spotted parameter (can’t remember the variable name now). I think it’s currently set to 25 kHz – I’d shrink that down to 1 kHz as a maximum (actually a few hundred Hz would be better for CW). Stations can QSY a few kHz and easily be lost in the mélé of a contest so a manual re-spot (not a self spot) of someome moving a few kHz should be completely valid.

73

Andy, G4PIQ 

From: Dxspider-support <dxspider-support-bounces at tobit.co.uk> On Behalf Of Dirk Koopman via Dxspider-support
Sent: 28 January 2025 21:36
To: The DXSpider Support list <dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk>
Cc: Dirk Koopman <djk at tobit.co.uk>
Subject: Re: [Dxspider-support] Self-spotting and de-duplication

It was 2:30 hours :-(.

The problem is not a simple one to fix as the minselfspotqrg value is only applied to new dx spot entry on the local machine. $Spot::dupage is effective over all spots, whether locally generated or coming in via links from other nodes, so that is the value to change to taste. One way users have to get around it is to QSY (enough) a lot :-)

Personally, if I had my way, I would track the number of self spots / hour and disconnect any user exceeding that value and (maybe) even impose of some minutes before they were allowed to reconnect. But then I am not a contester nor DXer, so what do I know :-).

However, I do know a few experts (some running specially configured local nodes) that, I suspect, will not welcome the deluge of self spots that are allegedly going to appear.

Equally, this may all be a storm in a tea cup as other contest(s/ers) have had self spotting for some time and I am not sure that it has had much impact so far. Especially as I am not changing the default value of minselfspotqrg , each node will have to do that by startup script.

73 Dirk G1TLH

On 2025-01-28 19:12, Keith, G6NHU via Dxspider-support wrote:

I thought the default had already been changed after the poll Dirk made some time ago about this. 

On 28 Jan 2025 at 17:43 +0000, Kin via Dxspider-support <dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk <mailto:dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk> >, wrote:

Keith,

Nothing will change if the default variable is retained:

sh/var $Spot::minselfspotqrg

$Spot::minselfspotqrg = 1240000     <- 1.2 GHz
What Dirk is implementing is intended for cases where a sysop chooses to support autospots, but this will always be conditional on the (>)qrg value of the aforementioned variable.

Spider is flexible enough for us to configure it to suit our needs—or almost ;)

Kin EA3CV

De: Dxspider-support <dxspider-support-bounces at tobit.co.uk <mailto:dxspider-support-bounces at tobit.co.uk> > En nombre de Keith via Dxspider-support
Enviado el: martes, 28 de enero de 2025 18:23
Para: dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk <mailto:dxspider-support at tobit.co.uk> 
CC: Keith <keithl at lebs.org.uk <mailto:keithl at lebs.org.uk> >
Asunto: [Dxspider-support] Self-spotting and de-duplication

Hi Dirk

If we must have self-spotting please make it a setting that the node sysop can enable as required i.e. on or off.

It's a shame that the rules have been changed by the RSBGB HF CC and a few operators want us all to fall into line.

I for one will be reluctant to carry out further software updates if I can't choose which goes against all the hard work that Kin has been doing to tidy up the network.

Let them create their own network/software  if they are that desperate for self-spotting.

Best 73 and thanks for all you do with the software.

Keith GU6EFB

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