[CQ-Contest] DX Summit Spots and more

[ko7ss at yahoo.com]

N1UR wrote:

"It would seem that the obvious solution to the RBN spot flood is to
designate just a handful of skimmers around the globe as robot interfaces -
ala W3LPL - and have the flitering set up to only submit the RBN spot once
every 15 or 30 mins.  Populates a global bandmap on CW for everyone running
assisted.  And if that is the way that community wants it.  At least it's a
fairer and more consistent situation"

Huh???

1) Serious competitive unlimited operators in the US don't use DX Summit.
It has no use and would be distracting at best.

2) The RBN accumulates all the spots from all the public internet connected
skimmers around the world. The RBN is a wholesaler that then distributes
these spots to retail nodes that individual stations can connect to. The
individual stations then apply filters to the RBN firehose so that they
only populate their N1MM bandmap with skimmer spots from skimmers sharing
similiar propagation, i.e. skimmers within 300 or so miles of them. I don't
know what "ala W3LPL" means, but it would probably be distracting at best.

3) The RBN "spot flood" is not that big a problem for the RBN. It collates
spots and distributes them. The computer heavy lifting is at the level of
of the individual skimmers that are running 1000 decoders on CW or 700 on
RTTY continuously for 48 hours straight on contest weekends.

73, Bill KO7SS