SOTAwatch alerts - filter by band or mode?

Just wondering: Could a filter by band or mode be implemented on the SOTAwatch alert page at http://www.sotawatch.org/alerts.php? I believe it could be useful for people who prefer certain bands or modes.

73, Jan-Martin

You want the SOTAwatch filter from Christophe ON6ZQ’s website

http://www.on6zq.be

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Can SOTAWatch filter also SOTA alerts Andy? I thought it was only Spots?

73 Ed.

Ooooh, now that suggests I read the question… I saw SOTAwatch and filter and put 2 and 2 together and got 5.

Jan-Martin,

As it happens, both alerts and spots can be filtered on band and/or mode in the sotamaps alerts and spots pages

https://sotamaps.org/alerts.php
https://sotamaps.org/spots.php

and you get to see them in the map. But hardly anybody ever uses those pages, and I often wonder why I bother to keep them running.

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Filtering alerts? There are so few its hardly worth it. So many activations occur without an alert.

View them all, they are a vanishing breed!

I my case because I never found them. We use the range pages extensively for planning, thank you, but have not used the alert page at all. It certainly does extremely well as a filter under present conditions (only one allG alert today) and should be great for planning s2s contacts.

Please do not discontinue it for lack of use - let its existence be better known.

73,
Rod

Hi Rod,

Thanks for the flowers - it always makes my day when people appreciate the features offered by sotamaps.

OK, point noted: I’m always far too optimistic that users will actually use the menu in sotamaps to look around and find these things for themselves. They are, after all, only two mouse-clicks away. But that’s one of the perennial problems with web services…

Rob

…it’s surprising how many people have not yet understood scrolling so far.

How true…

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The thing is, Rob, I go to your site for specific information and leave when I’ve got it, I never seem to have time to poke around and see what the latest addition is - my loss, I guess!

Brian, that’s fair enough, and nobody needs to do any more than that. But if one spends just a minute or so looking around, one might be pleasantly (or otherwise!) surprised at what one might uncover.

Actually, the spots mapping page has been in sotamaps for at least five years; the alerts mapping page for about three years.

Dear Rob,
You have implemented so many great features to your SMP and many of us have so little time to spend in the shack playing with radio, let alone looking for possible new features on SMP…
I didn’t even know about the existance of such cool feature.
See how it looks like:

Perhaps a bit of advertising wouldn’t harm.
Thanks Rob for the good work you do providing us with all these great things.
Cheers,

Guru

Hi Guru,

Thanks to you for your very kind comments. I do understand how little time people have to explore, not only in sotamaps, but everywhere in the interweb: it’s so vast!

Well, I’m not the kind of person to want to draw attention to myself, but even I have been thinking along these lines recently. So, I’m looking into the possibility of creating Youtube videos to explore various facets of usage of sotamaps, especially the (not yet live) new version.

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Hi Rob,
I believe preparing the videos for Youtube will take you too much time and it’s possibly too much work for you when, perhaps, the only thing most of us need is knowing about the existence of a certain feature.
Once we know it exists, we can go to SMP, look for it and start to use it. The features are usually easy to understand and use.
In my case, videos are not the best way to communicate something to me, as I usually can’t watch them due to being without earphones and having other people around or not having the time and the tranquility to watch them.
I prefer much better a written post with some images that I can read at any moment without bothering other people near me nor needing earphones.
The same applies to Activation Reports. Written reports with pictures are far more preferable for me than videos. I can read written reports at any brief time I may have, even one part now and the rest later. Videos are not so friendly for me to watch them like that.
My advice: you create a new thread called introducing SMP and you write a post per week or so describing one of the rarely used, therefore unknown, features.
A brief description of what we can have by using that feature and a few screenshots, shouldn’t take you as much time as preparing thise Youtube videos and should be enough for us to know and feel interested to enter SMP, try out and investigate by ourselves on the use of those features.
Kind regards,

Guru

There is in fact at the moment an easy way to get an introductory overview of what sotamaps has to offer, which is by viewing the quaintly-named overview page, which can be reached by clicking on the “overview” menu item at the top of any sotamaps page. Not sure if anybody has ever looked at that page…

Actually, I’ve already started to make a couple of videos, and it’s really quite easy to do; I bought a nice microphone for the PC and using Open Broadcaster software is all I really need to get going.

Of course everybody has their personal preferences, and I would hope to take account of that fact as I think about how best to present things.

I suspect in many cases this has more to do with the variable quality of such videos than with anything else.

That’s always do-able I suppose, but I would be somewhat reluctant to use the SOTA Reflector to publish details of what is, after all, (still) a privately-run software facility.

We’ll just have to see how things pan out…

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Thanks for the tip regarding Open Broadcasting Rob, I’ve been looking for a replacement for Microsoft Movie Maker ever since Microsoft disabled it’s operation on later versions of Windows.This looks like a good replacement with lots more features.

73 Ed.

Sorry for the late reply, I’ve been out of town for a few days. As for the filter on the map pages, I simply did not know about it. I’ve just tried it - it works fine, the trouble is that it gives me another map and not a list.

Why did I ask in the first place? On occasion, I have printed out the alert page(s) and carried the printouts with me when I was travelling with the radio (I do not carry a smartphone or portable computer). Not that I ever managed to work any of the announced stations, but that’s different kettle of fish. Depending on circumstances, I work either CW only on HF, or stick with VHF, hence a large fraction of the announcements was/is of no use to me whatsoever.

Well, sotamaps is a mapping site, so no surprises there…

So, a “Print filtered list” button might be useful in the spots/alerts pages?

TIP: sotamaps is extensible, meaning that if a user needs a special feature, it can very often be rapidly implemented, as has happened often in the past. But I can’t know if a user needs such a feature unless he/she asks for it (HINT: there’s a contact page made especially for this purpose…).

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