[Dxspider-support] An update about HamAward.

[Keith, G6NHU]

All,

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to approach the HamAward people independently to see if we could come to some solution for the current problem, much the same way I did with the HamClock developer about 18 months ago.

Once I'd made contact with them, I was introduced to one of their developers and we've been talking. Knowing how we handled the initial spots earlier this year and the actions they took was quite eye opening. Part of their process was to check that each spot appeared on the network in various places after it was submitted and if it didn't show, an automatic process would be taken to re-push the spot through. This was a big part of the problem.

We talked at length, I proposed a solution and it's been implemented and running for a week or so now. The process I described above regarding re-pushing a spot has been removed completely.

They've set up a new node using the current build of dxspider with the callsign IW1FRU-74 and at the moment, it has just one connection into the network, to my G6NHU-2 node.

When their activators hit the ‘submit spot' button on their custom software, a number of checks are made to ensure the validity of the sender and when they last submitted a spot. This duplication time has been increased to to 15 minutes so the most any activator will be able to spot themselves is four times an hour. Providing these checks are passed, a telnet session is created into their node and the spot is sent.

This has been running for nearly a week and in all the time I've been keeping an eye on it, I've not seen one bad spot come through, everything appears to be working perfectly well. You can do an rcmd command to IW1FRU-74 and check to see who's logged on and active at any time, and you can enter 'sh/dx origin iw1fru-74' on your own node to see the spots that have been submitted from them.

I know some sysops won't be happy that I've been talking to an organisation that's been considered the enemy for a few months but my logic is simple. I want good, reliable and accurate spots on my cluster, and I want to know these spots are genuine. I think that this is a good solution for all sides.

73 Keith.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.tobit.co.uk/pipermail/dxspider-support/attachments/20250318/a465a056/attachment.htm>