[Skimmertalk] Skimmer in CQWW and CPU Utilization Problem

[Steve Lott]

Dick,

One option is to narrow the band width and use Skimmer Schedule to change
areas (by bandwidth) looked at
throughout the contest
with skimmer schedule from http://www.wd5eae.org/

73
steve
KG5VK

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 8:20 AM, W3OA <w3oa at roadrunner.com> wrote:

> I ran a Skimmer for 48 hours during CQWW and I think it was a great
> success.  My score and number of q's went up 15 percent over last year
> for the same number of hours worked.
>
> The SDR was a Softrock Lite+Xtall version 8.3.  The antenna connection
> was from the Mark-V Rx Antenna Out jack.  I used a relay to cut the
> audio connection between the Softrock and the sound card to prevent a
> lot of false signals in the waterfall while I was transmitting.
>
> I had Skimmer set for 96 kHz sampling rate, Do not send callsigns
> without "CQ", and Paranoid validation.  The Master.dta file was one I
> had modified to remove all the US calls.  Thus the only spots sent out
> were for "counters" that were participants in previous contests.  I used
> Wintelnetx to combine Skimmer spots with spots from a Cluster node.
> These were fed into a simple chat server program to allow other Carolina
> DX Association users to see the combined spot stream via a telnet
> connection.  My local display was the N1MM bandmap.
>
> Skimmer was on a dedicated computer, a 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 with 2 gigs of
> RAM.  I noticed a couple of times (like the bottom 96 kHz of 40 during
> the first hour and 20 on Saturday morning) the CPU utilization was
> bouncing up to 100 percent and "Decoders" showed something like 600 of
> 1000 or 500 of 1300.  During these times the number of spots put out
> seemed to drop dramatically.  I wonder if this is normal operation?  I'm
> thinking a way to get around this is to use 48 kHz sampling rate and
> switch between band segments every so often, maybe ever 5 minutes.  I'd
> appreciate hearing comments from others on this.
>
> 73 - Dick, W3OA
>
>
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