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RBN but for the Rockmite

I really enjoy the reverse beacon network. It's been a tremendous first-blush check of whether or not the little Rockmite is working, and how far out the signal is getting. Having said that, it hasn't been useful in the way I think it might be for big contesting stations.

I always imagine someone sitting in their plush chair locked away in a shack watching the RBN. A path pops up on the map to some faraway DX station. Said ham leaps into motion clacking several switches to bring the appropriate antennas, tuners, and amplifiers into play for the band the dx station happens to be on, and then belts out a 100+ Watt signal to make the QSO.

But, that's not how it works with the Rockmite when you live in a densely populated urban area like San Francisco. Typically, the radio and I aren't even at home, much less in a shack. We're perched on the side of a mountain somewhere because there's less noise, and there are whole swaths of hams like SOTA and POTA that want to talk to radios on mountains. There aren't any switches to clack because the Rockmite only operates on two different frequencies spaced 500 Hz apart.


Still, I wondered if there was something the RBN could offer that might make operating from the house a little easier. Something that could make the Rockmite infinitesimally more like a contest rig. The thing that came immediately to mind was filtering RBN results not for geographical location, but for transmitted frequency. As I mentioned, the Rockmite is locked down to just two frequencies for transmit. What I hadn't mentioned yet is that the Rockmite also has a very wide front end. So wide that sometimes I'm keying away in response to a CQ that came in on 14060.0 kHz when the radio only operates on 14057.5 and 14058.0. What if I only responded to CQs that were on frequency, and furthermore had some kind of heads up when a CQ was on frequency? That'd be kind of nice.

Queue rbn_telnet.py. The little script, written by the 12 year-old here who's studying for her ham exams, myself, and ChatGPT hooks directly to the reverse beacon network telnet feed and filters on the frequencies the Rockmite uses. When a CQ is found on one of those frequencies, all of the pertinent information is dumped to the console in a single line like this:

b'DX de K2PO/7-#:  14058.2  WB7DND         CW    20 dB  17 WPM  CQ      2103Z\r\n'

A few nights back, the script netted results! I saw that N0IPA was calling CQ. I got on the air with the Rockmite, and I made a QSO! Last night, it wasn't so much that the script found a specific station for me to talk to, but that it told me about how other stations were communicating at the time. I noticed that the average speed for CW was around 15 WPM, not my customary 21 or so. I reduced my keying speed a bit, and there was K9OM! Might I add that both of these QSOs were made from the house!


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