Hello. I am new to ham alert and am trying to figure out how I can get alerts for states that I haven’t worked towards ARRL award. I am looking to get alerts for FT8 and FT4 on respective bands. I have set up triggers but it seems that I am getting alerts from spotter locations instead of what I am hoping for, say a call sign from someone in SD so I can attempt to make a contact with that call sign so I can get credit for working SD. Maybe I am not understanding the concept. I don’t know what a cluster is so I have the source set up for PSK reporter. Can someone help me get it set up. I have 5 states that I need on 1 band, 4 states on 2 other bands and two or less states on 4 other bands. Thank you.
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Your (currently disabled) triggers for various states look fine to me. The “State” condition is based on the state of the spotted station (as recorded in the FCC database), not of the spotter. If you get an alert that you believe is in error, then please post a screenshot here and we’ll find out why it was sent.
The “cluster” source means the regular DX cluster where people spot manually.
Thank you. It seems like my triggers are always getting disabled. To me that means that I may be asking for too much information. I did adust it from “States” I still need, to prefixes with “K0”, for region 4 (which I now get an alert when someone detects my signal. I don’t know if I should be using Cluster as my source or PSK Reporter (which seems to result in more alerts, thus disabling my triggers (too many)). When I do get an alert on a specific condition, and go look on that band, I don’t see a signal from one of my missing states, but a spotter must, which results in alerts that I don’t benefit from (of course, propagation has a lot to do with that, but I never see the call I am hoping to see, as active). Sorry for being one of the new users that is trying to figure it out.
I have a similar problem and have “solved” it by adding conditions:
- Spotter State – I live in mid-CA, so southern and northern CA spotter give me false-positives. You may get luckier if you are in a smaller state.
- not Spotter callsign – I’ve added Spotters-to-be-ignored that are out of my area (this list gets big here in 6-land)
- Spotter callsign – after a while you will see a list of “locals” which see mostly the same signals as you. Add their calls in this condition (probably don’t want both of 2 & 3)
- SNR – I use -12 to + 15 to try to weed out really weak ones that can be heard by better stations than mine.
Yes, in that case you need to add more conditions to make your triggers more specific, so they don’t match as many spots. @N6NXV has given excellent advice on this.
If you’re after FT4/FT8 spots only, then PSK Reporter is the better option, as the cluster will only give you very few spots to start with.
Once you narrow down the spots with more conditions, you should start seeing spots for stations that you can actually hear too.