I’ve had great success using HamAlert to alert me when my SDR skimmers hear signals of interest such as needed DXCC’s etc.
A few days ago I added a trigger for 600m. It consists of two conditions, Spotter callsign = mine, and Band = 600m. I know my WSJT-X spots are getting out, because they’re visible on PSK Reporter. In HamAlert, alerts are enabled on the Destinations page, and I see some from other triggers. This trigger is not paused. But so far my 600m spots are not triggering an alert from HamAlert.
Any ideas?
One other detail. The spots involved are FST4 mode. I’ve tried adding a condition to the trigger for mode = FST4, but this didn’t make it work. Nor did removing that condition.
I suspect the reason is that HamAlert does not process spots for WSPR, FST4W or other beacon-style modes at this time. See also:
The performance/throughput issue in the backend has been resolved in the meantime, but since HamAlert has always been geared towards spots for actual “QSO” modes rather than beacons, starting to process beacon spots out of the blue could result in thousands of users being inundated with alerts that they don’t care about. Therefore, an additional condition type such as “Spot type” would need to be added to differentiate between CQ and beacon spots, and beacon spots would only match a trigger if a specific Spot type = Beacon condition was present.
Thanks for the comment, but FST4 is not a beacon mode.
The names of modes for MF/LF can be confusing. FST4W is a beacon mode similar to WSPR. However, FST4 is a two-way QSO mode, the equivalent of FT8 for the lower bands (where FT8 is not used).
FST4 has a variety of TX/RX cycle times available ranging from 15 to 1800 seconds. However, 60 seconds (FST4-60) is the most common.
So my WSJT-X is posting spots of two-way QSOs in FST4-60 and FST4-120, and it would be great to be able to get alerts from them.
Thanks for the clarification. I’ve had a look at the data received from PSK Reporter (unfortunately I only have it starting at midnight 00:00 UTC for the current day), and see some 600m FST4 spots from various spotters that should have triggered an alert. Your callsign was not among them, but perhaps the time span of the log is not large enough.
I only see WSPR spots there, but again, perhaps the last FST4 spot was more than 24 hours ago. If you see your spot on pskreporter.info, please post a screenshot and I’ll check the logs again.
Thanks. Two-way QSO traffic is pretty infrequent on 600m currently – exactly why alerts would be helpful – so it may be a few days before I have a screenshot. I’ll get back here when I do have one to post.
Here’s an FST4 spot on 600m that my skimmer sent to PSK Reporter tonight. Interestingly, I also received a HamAlert notice for the first time. Did you modify anything?
No, I haven’t changed anything on the servers as I could not find anything wrong with the code/configuration. I created a trigger for 600m FST4 in my account yesterday to make sure that spots like those that I saw in the log actually triggered an alert, which they did.
Ok, thanks. It’s unclear to me what might have accounted for the apparent issue before, but it seems to be functioning well now. If any further questions come up, I’ll let you know. Thanks for taking the time to look into this.
