Very nicely put Andrew.
As was said above - we are all friends here but the fact is that things can change quickly on summits and a quick QSY or quick QRT may be called for. That’s life - there’s no malice intended against the chasers.
73 Ed.
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There has been a few times when I have changed bands/frequency to chase a S2S, especially if the frequencey I am on has an absence of chasers. Length of time on a frequencey is not really a relevant measure, its time with chasers that I try to maximise.
Compton
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Hi Ed, as a chaser I find this useful. I sometimes do it when I’m activating mainly for local 2m-FM chasers w.r.t the FM calling frequency. However, a member of the MT recently said, it’s bad practise.
I think the MT wish to avoid that SOTAWatch is flooded with spots that are not spots however while we have no alternative “back-channel” solutions for which which have been discussed on several threads on this reflector. Richard @G3CWI even went to the expense of setting up an interlinked voice server across YSF, DMR and (I think) D-star but it didn’t get used.
Now that with the new version of SOTAWatch that re-formats its screen beautifully on Smartphones, I wonder if a kind of rolling message board could be added to SOTAWatch for use as a back-channel for such information postings from activators - that would only appear on the screen and then get deleted as they roll off the screen after, say 10 lines?
For now I’ll keep my non-spot postings on SOTAWatch to a minimum, except when I am having connectivity problems and them you may well see an actual spot appear 2 or 3 times, exactly the same, using SMS and two Cell networks - often sometime after I sent them! The Cell networks over here could be improved.
73 Ed.
I wonder if anyone is seriously claiming that is a risk. I conclude from my daily observation of the spots page that the vast majority of spots are sensible and useful. If the number of spots has risen over the years, I would think that’s an indicator of the growing popularity of SOTA and not of frivolous postings. The easy-to-use toggle and modes-filter features are there to fine-tune the numbers viewed.
Every spot needs to be sent to the clients connected (browsers apps etc.)
There are 7040 SSO sotawatch sessions right now. Some will be latent and waiting to die.
The default is last 50 spots. Most people have the webpage update every minute. 7040 x 50 lines of data every minute. If there are lots of spots that are not actual spots but messaging spots then the noise in those 50 increases. This results in people asking for more spots.
There are currently 270 spots in the last 24hours. 270 x 7040 x 1440 results in GB of data being sent.
That has to be paid for. So we can ask for money to help pay for that data or we can try to minimise less useful spots.
And yes, there are plans to change the way refreshes work but all of the SOTA programmers have these things called full time jobs so changes we want to implement take much longer than we’d like.
Send donations to Barry.
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It’s a great service - I hope my previous posting reflected that.
Yes, but what percentage are unwanted spots? I just scan-read the last 24 hours of spots and saw one (depending on your definition of unwanted).
Maybe there is a service that distributes spots instantaneously? Tell me how to connect! At home I watch SOTAwatch and it refreshes about every five minutes. So when I am activating I expect it will be 5 minutes from when I send out an SMS spot to when I can expect someone to have seen it.
Al, N1AW
Hi Al,
SOTAWatch3 refreshes far more regularly than every 5 minutes! are you using the old website - try this URL and see how quickly it refreshes:
https://sotawatch.sota.org.uk/
When activating, submitting via the Internet is quicker than using SMS but even a spot submitted using SMS ought to appear in less than 1 minute unless there is something really wrong in the SMS network!
How are you monitoring spots when you are on a summit? Perhaps the App you are using has a setting as to how often it should go and get the latest spots?
73 Ed.
SOTA cluster’s update loop runs about every 62secs.
I should fix it so it’s every 60secs as I intended but what’s a couple of seconds between friends? 
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SOTLAS distributes spots to clients through a WebSocket connection, so no inefficient periodic refresh/reload is needed, and new spots reach the client instantly (SOTLAS).
However, as there is currently no streaming interface in SOTAwatch3, the SOTLAS backend still has to obtain the latest spots by polling SOTAwatch3 every 30 seconds (so new spots may be delayed by up to 30 seconds), but that only has to be done once, no matter how many clients are connected to SOTLAS.
</shameless-plug>
73, Manuel
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The cluster is the same, a 1 to many distribution to lower the load on the server. The plan is for the underlying methods to change on the services but presently nobody has much, if any, free time.
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