[CQ-Contest] 3Y0X, topband, and propagation - can you help?

[Eric Scace K3NA]

Hi everyone --

   After the 3B9C DXpedition earlier this year, Eric K3NA built some animated views of interesting 160m openings to North America.
These have been shown during presentations at Dayton, HamCom, and W9DXCC.  The animations revealed some interesting subtleties of
spotlight propagation and potential skew paths over the very long haul between Rodrigues and North America, especially to the west
coast.

   But a string of logged QSOs does not fully reveal what was experienced by the many topband operators who were receiving (or
trying to receive) the 3B9C signal at any given moment.

   Next month Eric will be one of the topband operators at 3Y0X.  We want to develop, and report back to you, a fuller picture of
160m propagation during that DXpedition.  To this end, we are planning to provide a standardized reporting form on the
www.peterone.com website with which any 160m operator can log what he or she hears during the course of an opening.  A more complete
description of the reporting features is attached below -- and we welcome your comments on this concept.

   In developing this concept, we came to realize that all topbanders would be interested in a real-time display, on an
automatically-updating webpage, of what reception reports have been recently logged.  Alex VE3NEA (author of the awesome DXAtlas
program) has developed a display that can form the basis of an animation showing, minute-by-minute:
   -- the grayline
   -- an icon for each reporting station, indicating received signal strength and the range of azimuths from which the signal is
arriving (if suitable antennas are present at that station).

   However, we find that we don't have all the resources we need to implement a real-time, animated webpage.  So we are now
appealing to the Topband community for help.  Here is what we need:

   1)  A Windows-based web server on the Internet with a static IP address.  Because DXAtlas and the mapping programs can not run on
a virtual server, this may need to be a dedicated machine between now and the end of the DXpedition (about Feb 6).  The accrued
database of reports should be archived and can be removed from the machine in mid-February when the team has returned home (we
hope!).

   2)  A person who can install and configure our application on that server during both the development/testing phase and the
DXpedition itself.

   3)  Someone (or group) who can design an appropriate set of web pages so that reporting stations can:
   -- describe their receiving setup (once, before the start of the DXpedition)
   -- submit one or more reception reports.
[Alex VE3NEA can write a script to save this data in a file format suitable for generating the DXAtlas map images.]

   4)  Someone (or group) who can design a web page that will display the most-recent 10 minutes (or so) of map images in a loop, in
a manner similar to weather radar on-line displays... or a range of times (for non-real time viewing, perhaps after more reports
have been received).

   If you can assist in any of these 4 areas, please contact us at the email addresses listed on the cc line.  (While it may be
possible to implement this with Linux/Unix servers, we don't have a map/grayline software tool for that environment, so porting to
Linux seems even more complicated -- unless a very talented individual steps forward, hi!)

   Thanks for your attention to our little dream project.  We wish we had started this a bit earlier... but there were some other
things do to first (build antennas, pack the shipping container, etc.)  We hope this sounds as exciting to you as it seems to us.
We're keeping our fingers crossed that the right assistance is available for the real-time display feature!  Feel free to circulate
this appeal to others outside the topband reflector community.

73,
   Eric K3NA
   Don N1DG
   Alex VE3NEA
   David VK4GL

===================

Reporting features:

A.  Station description:  provided once only.
   -- callsign.
   -- email address (for follow up questions after the DXpeditions).
   -- latitude/longitude of station site.
   -- list of antennas used to receive on 160m.
   -- for each antenna listed above, the range of azimuths over which this antenna hears better than the other similar antennas that
cover adjacent ranges.  In other words, if you say the 3Y0X signal is loudest on your beverage #1, and you've reported hear that
beverage #1 hears best over the azimuth range of 90-180° compared to your other similar antennas, then we will assume the signal
from 3Y0X is probably arriving from this general direction.  A large 160m station may have antennas with overlapping ranges; e.g., a
4-square (four sets of azimuth ranges) and various beverages (one of which will be the best at a particular moment compared to the
other beverages).

B.  Reports:
   -- callsign
   -- date/time (Z)
   -- antenna with best reception (from the list provided in the station description above).
   -- current noise level on that antenna (S units or dB over S-9).
   -- 3Y0X signal level on that antenna (S units or dB over S-9).
   -- is this the first moment 3Y0X has been heard this opening?
   -- is this the moment that 3Y0X's signal peaked at your location during this opening?
   -- is this the last moment 3Y0X was heard during this opening?

   Each station may report as frequently as they wish, up to once per minute.  Note that multiple openings might occur during a
particular night, so it can be entirely appropriate to report more than one set of start-peak-end times.

   We will try to design the form so that multiple reception reports can be entered at one time.