The math behind my Top 50 rankings I believe is a bit different than PSKreporter’s in that I don’t really care about a raw spot count aggregation, nor ranking an individual’s performance on a particular band. My goal is to find and rank the frequency hopping or simultaneous, multi-band, multi-mode skimming stations. I call these the “mega-spotters”. My system provides a tally of these mega-spotters unique call/band spots. Amongst these mega-spotters it also provides the ability to easily compare band by band which bands they detect unique callsigns rather than which produce duplicate spots. In the end its not completely clear to me how PSKreporter even comes up with their ranking numbers and I figured I’d do something that is advertised and has some explanation that is in the public domain and that people can hopefully understand.
In my ranking calculations I credit one point for a spotter’s unique Sender Callsign & Band pair they post in a 6 hour and a 24 hour period. So for example if K1ABC spots K1HTV on 20m/FT8, 20m/FT4, 20m/CW, 20m/WSPR and 20m/JS8 they get credit for just one point during that period regardless of the mode on that band. This still gives the spotter an incentive to skim multiple modes as not everyone operates all modes. The system does not credit the spotter for multiple mode spots on a single band nor for being on a band all day spotting the same station over and over again.
Unique spots are tallied for all bands 2200m through 6m and aggregated into a total spot count by which they are ranked for the Top 50. This means you don’t have to have the best unique spotting rankings on all bands, but it does give an incentive to try and spot on as many bands as possible. Again this tool does not provide a means to rank spotters on a particular band, only if they qualify as a mega-spotter and rank in that Top 50 class.
This ranking system is not a real-time system, but it is updated every 6 hours and has a rolling 24 hour window. I am pulling the compressed spot data (~400M) that is posted by N1DQ’s system. The file server has data which he’s made public as seen below. This data uncompressed is roughly 3 GB and holds up to 40 million decodes every 6 hours.
Here is the Top 50 ranks page entry point where you will find the latest rankings posted every 6 hours as well as links to historical rankings. Drilling into a page and it will show both the past 24 hour Top 50 Rankings for mega-spotters.
As well as the past 6 hour Top 50 Rankings for mega-spotters, which allows one to see how band conditions affect spotting from around the world throughout the day.
Currently on my compute platform it takes roughly 15 minutes to pull the PSKreporter raw data, uncompress it, calculate and generate the Top 50 tables for the 24 hour and 6 hour periods and post up to my web site.
Comments, questions, suggestions welcome at k1ra @ k1ra . us