Station Manager — native IPFIX reception reporting, live from 7Q5MLV (Malawi)

[Marc L. Veary (7Q5MLV)]

Hello all,

A short note to announce a new reporting client. Station Manager (SM) — an open-source (GPL-3.0) amateur radio logging application with a built-in FT8 encoder/decoder — now implements PSK Reporter reception reporting natively as IPFIX, per the developer spec at pskreporter.info/pskdev.html, and is running live from my  station (7Q5MLV, Malawi).

Implementation notes, for those interested in collector etiquette:

• IPFIX datagrams over a single long-lived UDP socket (constant source port), enterprise 30351 fields plus the standard flowStartSeconds
• at most one datagram per 5 minutes, with up to 30 s of jitter to de-synchronise reporters
• template descriptors sent in the first three datagrams and refreshed hourly, since UDP is lossy
• spots are de-duplicated and frequency-attributed from the dial reading at capture time, and reporting is strictly best-effort — a failed send never affects decoding
• developed and verified against the test collector before any production traffic

SM reports only while the operator is actively monitoring FT8 — capture is demand-driven, so it never holds a receiver open unattended. Source lives at https://github.com/ColonelBlimp/station-manager

Thanks to Philip and the PSK Reporter project for the clear documentation and the test endpoint — both made this straightforward to get right. Feedback welcome, especially if anything about our datagrams looks off at the collector end.

73,

Marc, 7Q5MLV

[Marc L. Veary (7Q5MLV)]

A short note to announce a new reporting client. Station Manager (SM) — an open-source (GPL-3.0) amateur radio application with a built-in FT8 encoder/decoder — now implements PSK Reporter reception reporting natively as IPFIX, per the developer spec at pskreporter.info/pskdev.html, and is running live from my station (7Q5MLV, Malawi).

Implementation notes, for those interested in collector etiquette:

1. IPFIX datagrams over a single long-lived UDP socket (constant source port), enterprise 30351 fields plus the standard flowStartSeconds
2. at most one datagram per 5 minutes, with up to 30 s of jitter to de-synchronise reporters
3. template descriptors sent in the first three datagrams and refreshed hourly, since UDP is lossy
4. spots are de-duplicated and frequency-attributed from the dial reading at capture time, and reporting is strictly best-effort — a failed send never affects decoding
5. developed and verified against the test collector before any production traffic

SM reports only while the operator is actively monitoring FT8 — capture is demand-driven, so it never holds a receiver open unattended. Source lives at https://github.com/ColonelBlimp/station-manager.

Thanks to Philip and the PSK Reporter project for the clear documentation and the test endpoint — both made this straight forward to get right. Feedback welcome, especially if anything about our datagrams looks off at the collector end.

73,

Marc, 7Q5MLV