[CQ-Contest] Reverse Beacon Network - After-Action Report

[Pete Smith]

No, I'm afraid you don't get it, Barry.  After this, let's QSY this 
conversation to Skimmertalk, but I can't leave your misunderstandings 
unchallenged on this large and influential forum.

We decided at the outset (Felipe, Nick and I) that the Reverse Beacon 
Network should be voluntary, and that we would facilitate its growth, 
but would not put ourselves in the position of censoring or disciplining 
the network.  First of all, we foresaw how impossible that would be. 
You complain about some specific quality problems with a couple of 
Skimmers, but ask yourself how you would like the task of filtering out 
bad calls from a spot stream like last weekend, when over 3 million 
spots were forwarded.  Even if the people trying to do the job were 99.8 
percent accurate, there would inevitably be mistakes made and people hurt.

The other fallacy is that we, through our two servers, somehow control 
the output of the entire RBN.  Many of our volunteers make their 
Skimmers openly available (some have to, in order to comply with contest 
rules). A number of DX cluster nodes now offer a wide variety of Skimmer 
spots as well as traditional cluster spots.  VE7CC is probably the most 
widely connected of these, but he's far from the only one.  We welcome 
this trend, because of the redundancy it provides, and the way it 
spreads the word about the RBN.

We're glad to help users and RBN volunteers solve their technical 
problems, and we will take a resolute stand against anyone who tries to 
hack our servers, but we are really just a more-or-less transparent 
facilitator for the work of the RBN's volunteers. That's how we like it, 
and that's how it will remain.


73, Pete N4ZR

PS I stand by my recommendation that filtering be done at the client end
  as well as at the individual Skimmers.  N1MM Logger has had a bad
call/bad spotter blacklisting capability for a year, and improvements
are underway that will make blacklisting (and unblacklisting) busted
calls just a mouse-click away.

The World Contest Station Database, updated daily at www.conteststations.com
The Reverse Beacon Network at http://reversebeacon.net, blog at 
reversebeacon.blogspot.com,
spots at telnet.reversebeacon.net, port 7000 AND now
at arcluster.reversebeacon.net port 7000



On 12/2/2011 6:27 AM, Barry N1EU wrote:
> Appreciate the comments and your hard work Pete, but I just don't get it.
>
> I posted one screenshot showing some obviously bad flaws in the
> system, and it's hard to accept that things can't be made better than
> that.  There's no reason it has to be democratic - if you send bad
> spots (don't follow the rules), you should get cut off from sending
> spots to the RBN system.
>
> It might be enlightening to do some quality control analysis - is
> there a super computer somewhere that could run all the spots dumped
> into the system during the contest against the callsign database and
> look at the list of spots that don't validate, i.e., what percentage
> are bogus, how the skimmer nodes each performed, etc?
>
> Taking the time during a contest to add bad spots to a logging program
> list is out of the question.  It already takes too much time to just
> delete them individually and having a long bad list isn't going to
> help cpu loading either.
>
> Perhaps the solution is to somehow recognize the skimmers that ARE
> doing the validation and not sending the bad spots and somehow filter
> out the spots coming from the other skimmers.  But I don't know of a
> way to do this, other than simply telnet into a single known good
> skimmer if that's possible.
>
> 73, Barry N1EU
>
> On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Pete Smith<n4zr at contesting.com>  wrote:
>> As always, thanks for your comments, Barry.
>>
>> Keep in mind that the RBN is a network of ~70 simultaneous volunteers,
>> all over the world.  CW Skimmer and Skimmer Server both have bad call
>> lists built in.  If 50 nodes have LW3LPL or RK3LR blocked, and 20 do
>> not, then the bum spots will still appear.
>>
>> We believe it makes better sense for users to implement their own
>> filters.  For example, N1MM Logger has both bad call and bad spotter
>> lists that can be fed from the bandmap's right-click menu.  A contest or
>> two and all those RF-caused busts can be history.  We're pretty well
>> convinced that validation against a master.dta file is *not* the answer.
>>
>> The problem of callers being spotted as if they were running is
>> well-known, but Alex has so far not been able to come up with a better
>> solution than that which is currently implemented.  I just keep an eye
>> on the bandmap, and ignore stations that appear in zero beat with
>> someone I've recently worked.  A short bandmap timeout also helps.
>>
>> 73, Pete N4ZR
>>
>> The World Contest Station Database, updated daily at www.conteststations.com
>> The Reverse Beacon Network at http://reversebeacon.net, blog at reversebeacon.blogspot.com,
>> spots at telnet.reversebeacon.net, port 7000 AND now
>> at arcluster.reversebeacon.net port 7000
>>