PSK Reporter is really a very cool program that collects reception reports from a myriad of users and displays the results, filtered in just about anyway you can imagine, on a map on your computer screen. I use it all the time to help me understand which parts for the world are open to communicating with me in Oregon. The latest exercise involved generating an animation of the real-time collected data. I set up one of my receivers to automatically change bands every couple of minutes, collect FT8 reception reports (spots), then switch to another band. Meanwhile, my laptop was looking at PSK reporter at my own reception reports and was instructed to take a screenshot of the PSK reporter map every five minutes, which also happens to be the PSK Reporter automatic update frequency. It took a little longer than 5 minutes to go through all of the bands I was monitoring, and the map was instructed to leave the spots visible for 30 minutes, so not everything is uniform and there are built in delays. Nevertheless the resulting animation gives you the flavor of radio reception over 24 hours.
Reception band key: Lime 160m, Pink 80m, Dk Blue 60m, Blue 40m, Green 30m, Orange 20m, Yellow 17m, Brown 15m, Red 12m.
Equipment used: IC-751A being controlled by HDSDR collecting spots on WSJT-X, using HDSDR’s scheduler to make band switches. Also my Genesis G11 SDR was controlled manually to fill in on some bands some of the time. Both receivers were connected to two antennas that were summed resistively together. The antennas were the long wire low band antenna up 100 ft. in the air and my bamboo hex beam up about 35 ft. The monitoring laptop was using Auto Screen Capture to record the images. ImageJ was used to turn the images into a movie.
Squash Practice 