After the recent addition of a cool feature in SOTAMAT to pull RBN spots, I started checking spots in the RBN mapping tool to see what is getting heard near me. Are there any tools that will do real-time mapping of say all spots on SOTAwatch in the last hour?
If not I may start putting together a tool to (ideally)
Pull recent spots in SOTAWATCH
Possibly also pull any recent logs of spots for SSB contacts when logged in real-time through SOTAWATCH.
Extract spots from recent RBN stream
Map spots over an appropriate, selectable time window.
Would it be an abuse of the RBN website to just use their tool for it? It looks like what is needed can just be passed in via url, e.g., for current CW spots, the following generates the following map.
I could also imagine a more extensive tool that would simplify aggregation of this info for activators, I have been checking back to RBN after an activation so see where I was heard, for example.
Questions for the group:
A: Am I missing a tool that does this already?
B: Are there any thoughts on the utility of a tool like this and/or what would make it most useful?
Also: Thanks Brian AB6D for some thoughts on technical steps to get started with this.
Corporate nonsense words aside, I was sure, prepared to put my money on it sure, this already existed in one of the various mapping apps. I was sure I’d played with it. Of course, I can’t find it now despite much searching over the last hour. So I’m wondering was it someone’s rough-and-ready demo I saw? Or a mapping webpage that has now been shutdown?
I’d love to get your feedback to workshop to see what sticks to get on the same page to leverage linguistic synergy!
I was also surprised that I couldn’t find a tool that did this already, it seems that it must exist somewhere! I think one issue in this DIY type community is the proliferation of tools, followed by the winnowing down to just a few that are actually used frequently.
To play with this the no-brainer starting point is
cat sota_spots | rbn url
but that would just be something to play with myself, I don’t think it would scale well or be fair to RBN to dump a lot of traffic on them.
I may also start pulling the RBN telnet stream first to just log all my spots for myself and then to pull the SOTA spots as well.
You can get the SOTA spots easily by using the SOTA cluster. Just make a raw connection to “cluster.sota.org.uk:7300” and the spots will be streamed out. You can send a “sh/dx” to get its current buffered list.
I’ve put together a bit more of a prototype on my end, it shows RBN spots liked to summits, on this map in the last 10 minutes. I can see a ton of activity on nearby RBN skimmers, for example. I’d love any feedback.
This was also an interesting exercise in Vibe coding, and has taught me a lot about what works and doesn’t work, but regardless clearly a very powerful tool. This took maybe 5 hours starting with basically no knowledge of how to make this type of page. It currently runs locally on my NAS and isn’t really a truly interactive site. On Github: GitHub - km6am/sota-spot-mapper: A local tool to pull sota/RBN spots and generate simple visuatlization
It is NOT a finished tool, but if anyone has feedback it would be very much appreciated. I am also not competent to set this up as an active webservice for the public so welcome anyone who would like to run with the idea/
