Background decoding
OpenWebRX is capable of decoding many digital signal protocols making it useful as an automatic reporting station application.
Right off the bench, OpenWebRX can decode all WSJT-X modes, JS8Call, as well as Packet, but will only do so when a user is connected and actively listening to one of these modes. Decoded station locations will be pushed to the built-in map. Colored squares indicate Maidenhead locators. Pins or symbols indicate stations beaconing a location via APRS or YSF.
The first step towards automatic monitoring is enabling "services". Services are decoders that will run automatically in the background, as soon as they detect that their frequencies are available on any of the SDR devices. For example, if you enable the service for FT8, and you have a user select the 40m band, the service will automatically start decoding FT8 on 7.074 MHz, while the user can listen to any other frequency or mode on the band.
As soon as the user disconnects, the SDR will shut down, and the background decoder will stop decoding. If you wish to keep your receivers busy, you can set up a schedule for each one of them, that will not only make sure that the background decoders have something to do, they also allow you to specify which frequency range should be available to decoding during specific hours of the day.
The background decoders and schedulers are designed not to interfere with user interaction of the service. A user requesting a specific profile will always take precedence over the scheduler selection. The decoders themselves use low scheduling priority, so that the user demodulation should still be possible, even if the CPU is saturated.
In the web configuration, navigate to the "Background decoding" section:
Here you can control whether or not background services are running, and which modes will be decoded when their frequencies are in range.
A scheduler will tell your receiver what to do when a device is not in use and becomes idle. Depending on its configuration, the scheduler will select a profile and tune your device accordingly, and keep the device running until a user connects, or until the schedule timeslot is over.
Schedulers are set up on the individual devices in the "SDR device settings" section of the web configuration. A scheduler only affects the device it is configured for, so every device can have its own scheduler and schedule.
Schedules to listen on specific profiles according to the time of day.
The example below illustrate tuning the
- 80m profile from 9pm to 4am
- 20m profile from 9am to 3pm
- 40m profile on the remaining slots between (all times are in UTC)
The "daylight" scheduler will calculate sunrise / sunset times and schedule your device for day / night operation respectively. You can optionally configure a "greyline" profile for the transition period (+/- 1 hour from sunset / sunrise).
Once your receiver is decoding digital signals, you may as well share your spots with some networks, so the transmitting stations can find out about their range.
Reporting can be enabled independently of background decoding and scheduling.
All of the following settings are located in the "Spotting and reporting" section of the web configuration.
You can automatically upload your spots to pskreporter.
Before you enable pskreporter, make sure you have set the receiver coordinates in the "General Settings" section correctly. It is included in all the spots and will lead to irritating displays if it is not set up correctly.
Please note that only decodes of the following modes are currently being sent to pskreporter: FT8, FT4, JT9, JT65, FST4, JS8, Q65. This is just based on my personal perception of what's most appropriate, feel free to discuss.
If your receiver is decoding any APRS signals, you can share them on the APRS-IS network. This is the default configuration:
Please note: APRS data is forwarded to the network straight from the decoding software (direwolf). Therefore, reporting to the APRS network is limited to the background decoding service since APRS-IS allows only one connection per client.
In addition to propagating received positions, you can also tell the system to beacon your receiver's position to the network. Before enabling the beacon, please make sure that the receiver location is configured correctly.
The beacon can be customized to contain additional information about your station:
- Beacon symbol
- Beacon Text
- Antenna height
- Antenna gain
- Antenna direction
You can forward all received WSPR and FST4W to the WSPRnet reporting network.
Once again, before you enable WSPRNet reporting, please make sure your receiver location is set correctly.
