[aprssig] HF NCDXF beacon reports on APRS?

Dave Baxter dave at emv.co.uk
Thu Jan 17 07:10:40 EST 2008


Hi..

I have for my own edification, setup an experimental NCDXF HF beacon
reception test, using the excelent "Faros" program...
http://www.dxatlas.com/Faros/

This is working very well indeed (and I'm amazed at what I can hear from
the edge of a noisy urban environment with a very modest non resonant
antenna)

I also have an experimental web page, built by following VE3SUN's
instructions, I'm not going to give the URL hear, as the server is
rather crude (Read "Fragile") at the moment, that shows what's been
heard etc..   You can see other examples linked from...
http://www.ncdxf.org/beacon/monitors.html

I was wondering though, how it would be posible to report the reception
of said beacons via APRS for "local" HF users, that is, none to 1 digi
hop.

Faros also creates a text based log file, as well as the .GIF images.
That has all the needed information, in the form...

;UTC-     -MHz-  -Call-    -SNR,dB-   -QSB,%- -Evidence-  -Delay,ms
00:00:10	14	VE8AT 	-7.1	   100	 0.08	       182
00:00:20	14	W6WX  	-6.5	   100	 0.30	        10
00:00:30	14	KH6WO 	-4.5     100	 0.22	       136
00:00:40	14	ZL6B  	-8.8     100	 0.11	        -1

In total, there are 18 posible beacons, and 5 bands to report on.

OK, so what would the list suggest as to how to construct an APRS
beacon, to show the basic stuff, beacon call, and an indicator of aprox
S/N value, say every 15 minutes, a complete IBP cycle time.  I guess the
un-received ones could be left out to reduce the APRS data load. 

Has this already been done I wonder?  If so, who, how, where, when
etc...

Or does the list think this will generate too much traffic, outweighing
whatever usefullness this might have.

Cheers.

Dave G0WBX.
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