On Saturday, 5 September 2020, I was planning to activate two summits where I would have no mobile signal. I posted an alert using the wildcards “W4C/WM-???” with an 8 hour time window in the comments line.
On the first summit I sent CQ on 40m and 20m CW, and never had a single chaser despite 30 minutes of trying. Due to unexpected delays I would not have reached the second summit until after the alert time window had closed, so I packed it in for the day. The nest day I had a successful activation with chasers on both 20 and 40 m, so I suspect the problem was not with the equipment.
Is it possible that RBNhole didn’t spot me because of the wildcards?
RBN certainly spotted WB8ICQ a few times both on Saturday (highlighted below) and on Sunday, but I havn’t been able to find any corresponding RBNHole spots, so details in the alert are probably the next thing to check. (However, any alert there might have been is now out-of-sight as far as SW3 is concerned.)
I can weave a magic spell and look at the spent alerts. But not from this computer as I’m currently at work (i.e. laptop in the kitchen). I can have a look when I get home (walk to shack and turn on shack PC)
Thanks very much for all the responses. M0LEP, thanks for confirming that the RBN system heard me. MM0FMF, I would greatly appreciate it if you can look at the alert and tell me what happened. I thought I was following KU6J’s guide, which recommends using ??? for the wildcard characters. If I made a mistake I would like to learn from it!
TKS & 73,
Scott WB8ICQ
So at some point it was case-insensitive, and now it is only upper case. I looked through the change log and it occurred when RBNHole took advantage of the then newly published API. There’s no indication why it was removed, but I do vaguely recall there being a reason caused by someone’s failed spot somewhere. That then got carried through into the next version that was recently released.
I’ll see if I can find out why the change was made with some deeper digging and whether I can easily revert it to handle whatever other bug was there, but basically your window was only -1/+3 for that alert and as you can see you were spotted on the RBN at 1800z for an alert time of 1330z
I note that the alert I posted for Monday, 7 Sept for a named summit (W4C/WM-011) had time windows in the comments using lower-case “s” (s-2, s+7). I was chased on both 20 and 40m on that summit, without self-spotting, so I assume RBNhole must have spotted me even with the lower-case letters in the comments line.
Maybe the case sensitivity is conditional for some reason and is a problem when wildcards are used, but not when wildcards are not used? Just guessing here.
Nope, nope, nope. On the 7th of September, you were alerted for 13:00 on WM-011, and your first RBN spot was 13:57z,which is well within the default window of -1/+3 hrs of 13:00z. You were spotted by RBNHole at 13:58z. Likewise your later summit SU-036 alert had no comment at all, and a start time of 18:45z. Your first RBN spot was also at 18:45z and RBNHole picked this up at 18:46z. It spotted your change to 40m at 18:58z after a RBN spot at 18:57z.
I’m staring straight at the source code and I can assure you that there is nothing conditional about the case sensitivity. The spotting and alert fetching code are actually completely isolated source code wise.
The RCA stands: on the 5th of September, your alert, by not having capital-S for spotting windows, defaulted to the normal window of -1 hours to +3 hours. Your RBN spots were outside this window. On the 7th, your alerts were also defaulted to the normal window of -1 to +3 hours, and because all of your RBN spots were within this window for each summit, RBNHole spotted you to SOTAWatch.