[Skimmertalk] Skimmer in CQWW and CPU Utilization Problem

[Steve Lott]

Dick and others there is a lot that can be added to the recipe to get spots
placed on our band maps

time will tell which recipe works the best :)

steve


On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 11:46 AM, W3OA <w3oa at roadrunner.com> wrote:

> Hi Steve -
>
> Thank you for the suggestion.  I'm anxious to try that during a big
> contest.  I'm wondering how often I should switch areas of the band?
>
> Dick
>
> Steve Lott wrote:
>
>> 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 <mailto:
>> 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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>>
>


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