Hi all, I enjoy operating six meters, primarily as the antennas are relatively small and easy to work with in my HOA/Stealth environment. (My main six meter antenna is in my attic.) I also love the randomness of Sporadic E.
However, as much as I enjoy six meters and ham radio, I don't enjoy being chained my to radio all weekend waiting for an opening. So I began to brainstorm ways for me to detect and alert myself to an opening. I played around a bit with the Reverse Beacon Network, but the difficulty with that is that those stations are not my stations. They often can hear things I can't, given my antennas are more compromised than most. What I needed was a reverse beacon that could detect what I could hear at my QTH. So last year I started playing around with one of those RTL-SDR dongles, which receive the 50 MHz band. This did not work out. My Python skills are not what they should be and my dongle would drift off frequency often and irregularly. So, I shelved that idea. A few weeks ago I began to rethink my alerting idea and realized that as I am essentially only a JT65 operator on six meters, I really only care about that mode. I did some investigating and noticed that the JT65 software I use -- JT65-HB9HQX -- records each signal it decodes in a CSV file. Things quickly fell into place after that. After some careful Googling, I found a freeware piece of software called TheFolderSpy that can monitor files for changes. It also -- and this is key -- will e-mail you when a file is changed! So now any time I want to monitor six meters for JT65 signals, I have my rig on and set to 50.276 USB, and the JT65 software and TheFolderSpy running. If it decodes a signal, the CSV file will be updated, TheFolderSpy will see this and fire off an e-mail as a TXT alert to my iPhone. It works really well. I just have to remember to shut off TheFolderSpy after the initial alerts or I'll be getting TXT messages after every decode, which is perhaps the only downside to this. I wish there was an alert-only-every-thirty-minutes option. So, hopefully this will get me to VUCC a little faster. Currently at 37 grids worked, 32 confirmed. Now to go build that Moxon.... 73, -- /*/-=[Michael / KT5MR]-=/*/
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