[Skimmertalk] Skimmer and aggregator question(s)

[kaz]

Hi folks.  First, apologies if this double posts to the list.

Finally laid hands on a couple of softrock kits, and I am finally 
getting a chance to play with skimmer and SDR.  Way fun.  I expected the 
surface mount parts to be difficult when building the first Softrock. 
Never tried any surface mount project before.  Wrong.  Turns out reading 
the numbers to sort out the capacitors was the hard part. Bright lights 
and magnification, and even my 17yo son had trouble(and he has 20/13 
vision).

But enough digression.

Bought skimmer license, have skimmer running on 40m and 80m.  40m 
calibrated(I think), 80m still pending.

Question#1
I'm not clear on the relationship between the skimmers and aggregator. 
If I run a skimmer session for each softrock, do I run aggregator for 
each skimmer?

My initial expectation was to run the skimmer sessions for each 
Softrock, use wintelnetx to put the spots together, and use aggregator 
to ship the spots to the RBN from the wintelnetx window/port used to 
collect the spots.

I found the documents N4ZR has written to be "spot on", but I have not 
seen/found any that describe this relationship.  (I probably did not 
look hard enough....???..hints appreciated)

Question #2
Is it necessary/required to open the port to the skimmer/aggregator to 
the world_wide_interwebz?  I would really rather not do that at this point.

Other trivia:
With two skimmers running on mostly dead bands, a dual core Pentium D 
(Dell Optiplex 745) ticks off about 15-20% CPU when the skimmers are 
minimized.  The 80m softrock skimmer is at 48khz on the on-boad 
Soundmax.  The 40m softrock skimmer is at 96khz on an ASUS Xonar DG.

The Xonar DG seems to be a fantastic value for a sound card. Also 
available as PCI-E, Xonar DGX.  Its main limitation over the more 
expensive siblings in the Xonar line seems to be its 96khz max sample 
rate, vs 192khz for big brother.

73 de w4kaz