Two faults, both found from one field log: 70 000 decodes, 10 and 12 m plainly
open, nothing announced — and the two openings that DID fire named the wrong
direction.
evaluate() required EVERY distinct station in the window to fit inside one 90°
arc. That is the shape of a sporadic-E cloud and of nothing else. With 10 and 12
m open on F2 the reports arrive from all round the compass, the arc is 360°, and
the test can never pass — so the busier the band, the less likely an opening was
announced. Exactly backwards. It now finds the DENSEST sector instead, which
keeps the Es signature intact (a cloud still makes one direction dense) and lets
a real F2 opening be seen through the handful of neighbours who are always
there. Scattered-but-busy still reports nothing: the point was to stop demanding
global agreement, not to call every open band an opening.
Sector() averaged the two bearings arithmetically, so an arc crossing north was
labelled by its opposite: 353–61° averaged to 207° and went out as SW when it
was NE. Not a vague error — a reversed one, given to an operator who may turn a
beam on it. The detector has handled the 0/360 wrap since it was written; only
this label had not.
TestClublog checked that three fields were non-empty and returned "Ready — CALL
via EMAIL". Nothing was ever sent to Club Log, so a wrong password produced the
identical green message. It now signs in, through getadif.php because that is
the one authenticated endpoint that cannot change anything: a test must never
put a record into someone's log. A future start year keeps it from downloading
130 000 QSOs to prove a password, and a rejected login answers 403 before any
body arrives.
LoTW is two credentials doing two jobs and the button reported only the first.
Uploads go through TQSL signed by the certificate — the website password is
never involved — so a wrong one breaks nothing until the day confirmations are
downloaded, by which time nobody connects the two events. Both are now checked
and, more importantly, reported separately.
Also: the detector still refused 12 and 10 m while the PSK Reporter feed was
already subscribed to them, so those decodes were fetched and thrown away. The
rule was never "HF is out", it is "is an opening here an event" — 20 m being
open is the normal state of the band, 10 m opening is not.
The detector refused any path over 2400 km, reasoning that past a single hop the
bearing test stops meaning anything. That was wrong, and it discarded exactly the
openings worth announcing: Nexus flagged a 6 m opening at 5477 km that OpsLog
never saw, because the spots were thrown away before any test ran.
Multi-hop Es is ordinary on 6 m — 5000 km paths are common, 10000 km happens —
and it stays directional: a second hop leaves the sector the first one entered.
So the sector test, which is what does the real work here, holds perfectly well
at any distance. The ceiling was standing in for a judgement it could not make.
The floor stays at 500 km: a short 6 m contact is tropo or ground wave and says
nothing about the ionosphere. Both are now pinned by a test.
Observation, not prediction, and it needs no new data source: the cluster event
worker already enriches every spot with the great-circle distance and bearing
from the operator's grid, which is exactly what a single-hop Es detection rests
on.
The signature is four or more DISTINCT stations at 500-2400 km inside a 90
degree bearing sector within twelve minutes. Each constraint earns its place:
distinct callsigns because one station spotted by six skimmers is six spots and
one station; the lower bound because a 6 m contact under 500 km is ordinary
tropo and says nothing about the ionosphere; the upper bound because past one
hop the bearing test stops meaning anything; and the sector because a real Es
cloud illuminates a direction, which is what separates an opening from a merely
busy evening.
Fed AFTER the Historical guard in the worker. A SH/DX reply replays a hundred
past spots in a second - precisely the shape of a burst - and would announce an
opening that ended hours ago.
Season LABELS, it never gates. Both hemispheres get a summer peak and a lesser
winter one, and an opening outside those is announced with "unusual for the
season" attached: the rare one is the one an operator must not hear about last.
One announcement per band per opening (45 minute quiet period). An opening runs
for hours and produces hundreds of spots; one alert is information, forty is
noise.
rouggy