Author: g0pot

Lids CW Spotter Bot – the product of an idle mind!

g0pot 1 Comment

It all started with a tweet. Whilst idly tuning up and down the bands, I wondered if there was a way to know if any other LIDS were on air, and then the germ of an idea formed. So like a fool, I tweeted it...

The germ of an idea

Well, that was it. I was committed now (or should have been). Searching around for ways to pick up spots, I looked at the Reverse Beacon Network, DX clusters, and eventually found the very excellent HamAlert which does all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace for you. You give it a list of call-signs, it compares incoming spots from RBN, clusters, sotawatch and pskreporter. If a spot matches your criteria (in this case, a list of currently 270 call-signs) it can do several things with the information.

HamAlert

Getting the information onto twitter wasn't the easiest, but a web service was found which will turn emails into tweets. So the spots get formatted by HamAlert, sent by email to the WebApp which turns them into tweets, and the LidsCW Spotter is the result.

The only downside of the system as it stands, is the membership list of call-signs needs to be manually updated; no great shakes though as @lids_cw tweets every time a new member is added!

All in all, an interesting exercise, which seems to have produced a useful resource. And if it gets more LidsCW members firing dots and dashes at each other across the airwaves, well, that makes it all worthwhile.

Lids Spotter output

73, Chris G0JPS
#156

Share you CW journey

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If you’re learning or have mastered CW you’ll know what a journey it can be and how easy it is to fall by the wayside. There is no one right way to master The Code but there are probably a lot of common pitfalls and we all need a little encouragement now and then to keep us on track.

We’d love to hear your learning stories, what’s worked, why you’ve hit a wall and how you overcame set-backs.
Under ‘Resources > Your stories’ we’d like to share your experiences…even if you’re still learning.
In ‘Resources > Learning tools’ we are trying to bring together learning tools that have worked for members.
Once you start having your first tentative CW QSOs you may find there are some hints, tips and tools to help you not feel like an utter failure :o) You can share those in ‘Resources > Operating aids’.

Whatever your experience, what ever has helped you go from Zero to Hero, why not share it with you Ham Buddies so they can be CW heroes too. Drop us a line with your stories, photos, articles and ideas and we’ll try to publish them here.

You can reach us on email admin@lidscw.org or, of course, send us a Tweet to @lids_cw

Getting active on CW

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If you are learning to get comfortable using CW it’s important to have regular on-air contacts to build your skills and maintain your confidence. If you want to make those normal (template) QSOs a bit more of an interesting challenge then why not get along to EUCW and check out the Snakes and Ladders activity.

Snakes and Ladders simply takes your normal QSOs (anything longer than 5 minutes) and looks at the QRA or Maidenhead Locator of your contacts. At the end of each month it analyses all the participants logs and chooses some of those locator squares to be snakes and some to be ladders and you gain/lose points accordingly!

The great thing about Snakes and Ladders is that you don’t have to do anything above and beyond your normal QSOs other than log the other stations QRA/locator and submit your log at the end of each month.

Find out more here http://www.eucw.org/

If you’re a FISTS member you can download a handy log converter which automatically reads your log and prepares you Snakes and Ladders submission. https://fists.co.uk/