SOTA Software Writer's Forum

In reply to E71DX:

My question is, is there an direct way to access SOTAwatch spot

There is an RSS feed.

and also is there a way to send out spots via sotawatch.org besides by logging
on and filling out the form

Spotlite is a lightweight spot/alert interface using http. It’s used by the SMS bot as it’s so simple to implement.

http://www.sota.org.uk/Spotlite

Andy
MM0FMF

In reply to MM0FMF:

Hello Andy,

thanks for the info. I knew about the RSS feed, it is great but is limited to 10 spots.

I did not know about Spotlite, thanks once more for pointing it out.

Sanjin
E71DX

In reply to E71DX:

Hi Sanjin,

I’m working on a MS Windows application to monitor SOTA spots and I am currently using the Twitter Search API to retrieve the spots. The advantage is that it can poll for new spots frequently without loading the SOTA servers, but the disadvantage is that you need to write a parser for the results that come back. Info on the API is here:

This is the URL I use on initialization to grab the most recent spots:

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=from:SOTAwatch&include_entities=true&result_type=recent

Once I have the most recent spots, I can then send the Twitter API a different query to return just the new spots added after that.

FYI, the problem I am trying to solve is that I am often busily working at my laptop, forget to check the spots at sotawatch.org, and end up missing an activation. This application will allow me to configure it to play an alert sound when a new spot shows up that meets my criteria (association, band, mode, etc.) and I can then run into the shack and try to work the station.

Hopefully I am not reinventing the wheel, but I wasn’t able to find any existing applications that do what I want mine to do.

73,

Eric
KU6J

In reply to KU6J:

I’m working on a MS Windows application to monitor SOTA spots and I am
currently using the Twitter Search API to retrieve the spots.

Interesting that the Twitter API is being used to get the spots without having to parse the web page. I originally intended it as nothing more than a cheap way of getting spots sent by SMS.

However do remember that the Twitter feed is very much an “unofficial” facility, and itself works by parsing the web page…

I have every intention of keeping it going, but I’m running it on servers at work and the time may come when I can no longer do this. It’s also very vulnerable to changes in the web page format which can happen at any time; I will try to adapt to any changes that do happen but there would most likely be a hiatus, especially if I’m away at the time.

It’s fairly amazing to think what is actually going on behind the scenes to achieve all of this!

Martyn M1MAJ

In reply to KU6J:

Hello Eric,

I was away from home for some time, sorry for not replying.

The twitter feed would be great but unfortunately it has some slight delay so it does not display spots in “real-time” compared to sotawatch.

73, Sanjin
e71dx