WZ7I Amateur Radio

CW Skimmer receiving station

I run a QS1R SDR receiver with Skimmer Server, software from Alex Shovkoplyas, VE3NEA, that detects CQ calls on 7 bands at once. You can use DX cluster software to have these CQ calls pop up on your computer, often before your friend finishes his call.

Here is some information on my receiver:

A HyGain HyTower Jr. vertical antenna obtains a signal which is amplified by the Clifton Labs Norton amplifier and then fed to the QS1R SDR receiver. The Skimmer Server software runs both in the FPGA chip in the receiver and on a PC. The CQ calls are identified and are made available by telnet. You can access them via the internet from two DX Cluster sites, ve7cc.net, port 23 (use the command "set/skimmer" to turn on Skimmer spots), or telnet.reversebeacon.net, port 7000. These servers should give users quite complete coverage of CW on the bands. (If for some reason you prefer to connect directly to my Skimmer computer, telnet to cw.wz7i.com, port 7300. A direct connection has the disadvantage of no filtering capability.)

You will undoubtedly want to do some filtering at the cluster server to reduce the number of spots to something manageable. Having forgotten the telnet commands to set up filters, I downloaded VE7CC's "CC User" software and got the sever filters set up exactly as I wanted. Even after filtering to limit the spots to those receivers in North America I had a lot of duplication of spots.

On my shack computer I run SpotCollector, an excellent DX Cluster telnet program, and receive these spots just as any other ham with an internet connection can do. SpotCollector makes it very easy to connect to as many as four telnet spot sources as well as a web DX Cluster. Spot Collector is different from other DX telnet clients. It is a database with one entry for each DX station which is updated as new spots for that station appear. It is particularly good at reducing the redundancy in the data stream from Skimmer clusters and, in effect, doing "data mining" in real time. Please see the author's comments on the use with these clusters.