I’ve been seeing spots coming from a station identified as “W/SWL/TYRONE”. The main issue is that the frequencies spotted are consistently wrong. For example, I have a trigger to alert on my own callsign. Although I’m actually on 14.074, in this case the spot reports me as 14.094588, which incorrect. This is just an example, there are others.
Is there any way to block spots from this user other than by adding it to each of my triggers? I’m sure that this is an issue for others as well. Any suggestions?
A “Global Block” has been raised several times. I see a LOT of “N0CALL” and similar, generic invalid calls, so I’ve had to add all those individually invalid calls to each trigger. A real pain, but once added, it does keep the alerts to real world callsigns. Every week, it seems, I have to add another one to all of my alerts.
A master block list maintained by each user would be great. Just like a “trigger” only in reverse logic. Many “skimmer” software packages are also running amuck. Perhaps a simple call sign verification via qrz.com when an account is created would help bunches.
It’s still a great program and it’s brought in many new Challenge Points and a few new DXCC’s for me over the time I’ve used it.
Aside from adding a per-user “not callsign” condition that applies to all triggers (I agree that this would be a useful feature), as it seems that the same bogus spots affect many users, perhaps it would be even better if we collected as many of those bad spotter callsigns as possible, so they can be blocked globally for all users. That way, all users will benefit from the blocking and we can avoid repetitive work.
So this is a call to all users to post spotter callsigns (incl. spot source) that you have found to produce bad/wrong/fake spots in this thread. I will then block them.
It took a little digging but the callsign I mentioned (W/SWL/TYRONE) seems to be from pskreporter. I suspect like others, our friend Tyrone doesn’t have his radio integrated with whatever software he’s using, or perhaps as a non-ham just isn’t aware of the importance of the correct frequency.
I have added N0CALL and W/SWL* to the list of blocked spotter callsigns for PSK Reporter spots.
For the record, the following logic applies to all PSK Reporter spots:
Quorum: at least 3 different spotters must report the same station on the same band and in the same mode within a 15 minute interval before the spot is processed. This is to avoid false alerts e.g. for 6m openings when a spotter has their radio/CAT misconfigured and is listening on a regular HF band while reporting the spots as 6m. Note that this does not consider the exact frequency, just the band (hence why the W/SWL/TYRONE spots still got through).
Spotter callsigns that don’t look like regular amateur radio callsigns are excepted from spotter DXCC lookup, as it is likely that the result will be wrong. The spots will still be processed, but without spotter DXCC information, so if there is a spotter DXCC/continent condition in a trigger, it will not match.
I was on 20m FT8 a few minutes ago (about 8 hours after your post) and did get a spot from W/SWL/TYRONE. Is it possible that spot came from some other source as well? I see that his spots are indicating a recent version of WSJT-X, though as usual the frequency is wrong.
There would have been other spotters (I can see on PSKReporter lots of folks are hearing me), is that somehow interacting with the “quorum” rule and allowing his spot through?
For what it’s worth, it seems like the only time I’m seeing these spots is in the trigger I have set up for my own call (which also means it’s easy enough to fix), but that doesn’t help the more general issue.
What am I missing? (If it’s something obvious, I will blame it on not having finished my first cup of coffee this morning).
