[SCCC] SoCal DX Spotting Nodes?

[Steve]

At 08:05 AM 4/15/2021, Clayton Nall wrote:
>Just curious—with the firehose of RBN spots, are 
>2m-based clusters still feasible, or are there bandwidth problems?

I'd sure hope they're still feasible. I miss the 
camaderie I had with all the other guys who were 
on the PVRC cluster back some 25 years ago, and 
to a lesser extent, up in Mashachewzits. We 
could, and did, PM one another all the time, 
sharing personal observations on someone's signal 
or what we were actually hearing from some DX 
station. Sometimes, the whole cluster (the one 
I'm remembering most fondly was based on W3LPL as 
the center hub at the time; I was connected to 
the W0YVA node but there were up to 8 or 10 other 
nodes comprising the whole W3LPL cluster, which 
covered all of Maryland, most of Northern 
Virginia and West Virginia, Delaware and parts of 
southeastern PA and northern NC) was connected to 
other clusters and one could jawbone with others 
in far-flung clusters well out of V/UHF range. We 
even had "For Sale/Wanted" lists (those were not 
generally shared by the various clusters, so they 
were mainly local). There were other features 
available that we don't get with today's internet 
spotting systems, which seem relatively sterile 
and very limited by comparision.

SteveH K0XP