A PSK Reporter message says "X was heard BY Y". The watcher measured the
distance and bearing from the operator to X and stopped there, never asking who
had actually heard it — so a station 1400 km away, decoded by somebody in Japan,
counted as evidence. That proves the path from X to JAPAN and says nothing about
whether anything reaches this station. It is how a "2 m opening" came to be
announced out of a KX9X in the United States, and the operator was right to find
the callsign list absurd.
Reports are now kept only when the RECEIVING station is within 300 km. Far
enough to borrow the ears of a whole region — an opening reaches an area, not a
postcode, and waiting for a decode at one's own antenna is just working the band
— and close enough that the ionosphere doing something there is it doing the
same thing here. The transmitter still supplies the direction and the path
length, which is what was always wanted from it.
Also drops 12 m from the watched bands, at the operator's request: at this point
in the cycle it is open often enough that announcing it is a notification rather
than news, and a band that cries wolf costs the ones that do not. One fewer
subscription is also less traffic on a PC that pays for every message.
The detection shipped reading whatever the operator's cluster nodes happened to
carry. On VHF that is a few hundred skimmers, nearly all of them on HF: a 6 m
opening carrying 869 stations reached OpsLog as a handful of spots or none, and
Nexus flagged it on the same PC while OpsLog stayed silent.
internal/pskr subscribes to pskr/filter/v2/<band>/# on PSK Reporter's MQTT
broker. Every ordinary station running WSJT-X reports what it decodes, so the
difference is two orders of magnitude rather than a threshold. The feed's shape
suits us exactly: BOTH grids are in each message, so distance and bearing are
arithmetic — no lookup, and no DXCC-centre approximation, which is what made the
cluster path's bearings coarse. The geometry is injected from app.go so it stays
the same arithmetic the cluster path uses; two answers to one question is how a
bearing quietly becomes wrong.
Volume was the design constraint, not the protocol. Six metres open is thousands
of messages a minute and this runs on some very old PCs, so nothing is kept or
persisted in the watcher: each message is parsed, measured and handed on or
dropped, and the detector's existing window does the deciding.
And the part that was the real bug: enabling the watch now ARRANGES ITS OWN
SOURCES. It adds the two RBN nodes when missing and brings the feed up. A
feature that silently depends on sources nobody can know are needed does not
look unconfigured, it looks broken. Matched on host and port, not name, so an
operator who renamed theirs does not get a duplicate — which the detector would
read as twice as many stations, and announce an opening that is not there.
Turning it off leaves the nodes alone: they may have been wanted for their own
sake, and removing a node someone is using is worse than leaving one they are not.
rouggy