I’m new to HamAlert, very nice tool. Today I was using WSJTX FT8 on 20M to make contacts during the 19:00Z hour April 15. All five contacts that completed and popped to log in WSJTX are different than those reported in HamAlert Iphone app. One was reportedly an RBN but I looked up the call sign on QRZ and there was no mention of an RBN, the other four were from PSKR. This is strange, Am I not understanding how it works?
Keep up the great work, much appreciated.
Claude
VE6GTX
Hello Claude,
HamAlert does not process contacts/QSOs, but spots – in case of FT8 mostly from PSK Reporter. As almost everyone who uses digimodes is also a spotter, this means that for each station that is on the air, a flood of spots will be processed by HamAlert, and probably dozens if not hundreds of spots for the same station will match your trigger(s). As it would be annoying to get dozens of push notifications for the same station on the same frequency at the same time, HamAlert deduplicates spots (see also the “Limits” page). Due to that, you will only see the first spot for the same station/mode/frequency within 15 minutes, which will most likely be from another spotter than you. But that doesn’t matter for HamAlert’s use case, which is to alert you to stations that you could be interested in based on your triggers, vs. ones that you have already worked.
Hopefully that clarifies how HamAlert works.
73,
Manuel