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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

"Spots"? "DX Clusters"? What does any of this mean?

This is a tool for amateur ("ham") radio users. Many amateur radio operators like to make contacts with others who are doing something more interesting than sitting in their home "shack", such as people in rarely-seen countries, remote islands, or on mountaintops. Such operators are often "spotted", i.e. when someone speaks to them, they will put the details such as their operating frequency into an online system, to let others know where to find them. A DX Cluster is one type of those systems. Most outdoor radio awards programmes, such as "Parks on the Air" (POTA) have their own websites for posting spots.

Spothole is an "aggregator" for those spots, so it checks lots of different services for data, and brings it all together in one place. So no matter what kinds of interesting spots you are looking for, you can find them here.

As well as spots, it also provides a similar feed of "alerts". This is where amateur radio users who are going to interesting places soon will announce their intentions.

What are "DX", "DE" and modes?

In amateur radio terminology, the "DX" contact is the "interesting" one that is using the frequency shown and looking for callers. They might be on a remote island or just in a local park, but either way it's interesting enough that someone has "spotted" them. The callsign listed under "DE" is the person who entered the spot of the "DX" operator. "Modes" are the type of communication they are using. For example you might see "CW" which is Morse Code, or voice "modes" like SSB or FM, or more exotic "data" modes which are used for computer-to-computer communication.

Why can I filter spots by both Activity and Source? Isn't that basically the same thing?

Mostly, but not quite. While POTA spots generally come from the POTA source and so on, there are a few exceptions:

  1. Sources like GMA and Parks 'n' Peaks provide spots for multiple different programmes (activities).
  2. Cluster spots may name activities in their comment, in which case the source remains the Cluster, but an activity is assigned.
  3. Some activities, such as Worked all Britain (WAB), don't have their own spotting site and can only be identified through comments on spots retrieved from other sources.

Spothole's web interface exists not just for the end user, but also as a reference implementation for the API, so I have chosen to demonstrate both methods of filtering.

How is this better than DXheat, DXsummit, POTA's own website, etc?

It's probably not? But it's nice to have choice.

I think it's got three key advantages over those sites:

  1. It provides a public, well-documented API with an OpenAPI specification. Other sites don't have official APIs or don't bother documenting them publicly, because they want people to use their web page. I like Spothole's web page, but you don't have to use it—if you're a programmer, you can build your own software on Spothole's API. Spothole does the hard work of taking all the various data sources and providing a consistent, well-documented data set. You can then do the fun bit of writing your own application.
  2. It grabs data from a lot more sources. I've seen other sites that pull in DX Cluster and POTA spots together, but nothing on the scale of what Spothole supports.
  3. Spothole is open source, so anyone can contribute the code to support a new data source or add new features, and share them with the community.

Why does this website ask me if I want to install it?

Spothole is a Progressive Web App, which means you can install it on an Android or iOS device by opening the site in Chrome or Safari respectively, and clicking "Install" on the pop-up panel. It'll only prompt you once, so if you dismiss the prompt and change your mind, you'll find an Install / Add to Home Screen option on your browser's menu.

Installing Spothole on your phone is completely optional, the website works exactly the same way as the "app" does.

Why hasn't my spot/alert shown up yet?

To avoid putting too much load on the various servers that Spothole connects to, the Spothole server only polls them once every two minutes for spots, and once every 30 minutes for alerts. (Some sources, such as DX clusters, RBN, APRS-IS and WWBOTA use a non-polling mechanism, and their updates will therefore arrive more quickly.) Then if you are using the web interface, that has its own rate at which it fetches the data from Spothole. This is instant for the main spots list, with new spots appearing immediately at the top of the list, while the map and bands displays update once a minute, and the alerts display updates once every 5 minutes. So you could be waiting around three minutes to see a newly added spot, or 40 minutes to see a newly added alert.

What licence does Spothole use?

Spothole's source code is licenced under the Public Domain. You can write a Spothole client, run your own server, modify it however you like, you can claim you wrote it and charge people £1000 for a copy, I don't really mind. (Please don't do the last one. But if you're using my code for something cool, it would be nice to hear from you!)

What commands are supported in the telnet server?

Currently, exit, and nothing else. Support for some DXSpider-like commands may be added to Spothole in due course, but at the moment if you want to add Spothole as a telnet cluster data source to your desktop logging application, that application must handle filtering itself.

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