One Thousand Spots

[W B McCarty]

I had thought myself helpful in monitoring 24x7 and logging the spots. But as I switched to FT8 I began recording over 2,000 spots daily, about evenly divided between 20 and 40 meters. Because database queries return not more than 1,000 records (necessary to optimize system performance) I can no longer get a complete 24-hour map. I don't know if this has any larger implications for research or study, but it makes me sad. I wonder if, in the longer run, we might have some additional filters that could be used to reduce the number of spots included on a map. I would suggest Continent or ITU Region as potentially useful filters. Time of Day (that is, UTC hour) and Distance might also be useful. Others may be able to offer other or better suggestions. 

Having nothing to do with the foregoing, I confess that I sometimes fail to change the Band in my application when I re-tune my radio and one or more spots sometimes slip by with the wrong Band. I see in the database that I'm far from the greatest villain in this respect. I wonder if we might see some cross-validation of the Band and Frequency fields. Ideally, Band might be computed from Frequency. But that might be hard to accomplish depending on the language used in programming database inserts. Perhaps spots with inconsistent Bands could be rejected or loaded into a special table holding records that failed validations. As you can tell, I am a fan of data hygiene. It's very hard to clean up data after it's been inserted because the work must be done in every query that might be affected rather than just once, at the time of insert.

Cheers,