WSPR Alerts for propagation Opening

The tool is fantastic! An improvement that would be greatly appreciated would be the possibility of issuing alerts for the opening of propagation to certain areas/countries, using WSPR beacons/reporters. The big advantage in my humble opinion is that they are fully automated records and do not require human intervention, so propagation openings for certain regions can be quickly flagged. Today we have a public database, which can be freely consulted every time interval (e.g. 5 minutes) to check for new spots.

I’ve previously had a look at integrating WSPR spots into HamAlert. Actually HamAlert already gets a live feed of WSPR spots from PSK Reporter, but it currently ignores/drops them. The reason, as with other digimode spots, is that the spot volume is simply too high to be processed by HamAlert (as every spot must be matched against currently over 100k triggers with even more conditions). That’s also why HamAlert ignores FT4/FT8 spots for the most common DXCCs on general HF bands. Even with these limitations, HamAlert processes an average of 100 spots per second, with much higher peaks. It looks like the WSPR spots alone would double that volume.

The HamAlert backend has some elaborate optimizations so it doesn’t need to check each and every condition of all the 100k triggers for every spot, but even that is not enough to process more digimode spots with a reasonable amount of computing power, especially in the face of growing numbers of HamAlert users, and very rapid growth in the number of digimode spots (since almost every digimode user is also a spotter). Perhaps if the matching engine, which is currently in Node.js, was rewritten in a more efficient language, more performance could be gained.