The Ham Radio Series 41 - Ham Radio in the Information Age - Part II

For reference, part 1 was November 12, and I would have sworn it was a couple of weeks ago, not five weeks. 

The theme there was using modern tech to replace time sitting in the chair in front of the radio, listening and watching.  Reduce the hours of BIC time (Butt In Chair) you spend.  In particular, I talked about a web site and phone app called Ham Alert and had an example of how it had worked for me within a matter of days.  

Briefly, the way I set up the "trigger" it used to alert me was that on 6 meters (the 50 MHz ham band), if someone in Florida reports hearing or the software running in their station decodes and reports a station in Hawaii or Alaska, it should let me know.  Your station can generally be configured to report what it decodes (in the digital modes) so that it's possible your station could decode the one you're trying for but it goes through a handful of internet hops along the way.  For example, my station reports what it decodes to PSKReporter without me having to do anything.  It's a setting in the digital mode software called WSJT-X - there's more info on both WSJT-X and PSKReporter in a more detailed article from '22.

At the moment, I have PSKReporter showing a map of everything my station has reported hearing in the last 6 hours, during which the radio was on two different bands, 15 and 12 meters.

The red dots are 12m and the other color are 15m.  At a glance, you can see the 15m dots include locations farther away. 

My emphasis tonight, though, isn't PSKReporter, it's a more direct way of getting your station to alert you if some state, or country or whatever condition you're going after is being heard by your station while you're not sitting BIC in front of the radio. It's called JTAlert, where JT comes from the weak signal mode software called WSJT-X. The main difference between HamAlert and JTAlert is that JTAlert just monitors your station.  The advantage there is you know the desired station is being heard where you are.  The immediate disadvantage is that if your radio is off, like mine was when I got that HamAlert message that someone in Florida was hearing Hawaii, you'll get no alert.  You need to have your station powered on all day everyday, whether you're in it or not

Like HamAlert, JTAlert can be configured to alert you via a message to your phone;  HamAlert requires a 3rd party app to send texts to you but will activate the phone app in your name and send an alert tone.  JTAlert by default will play a sound through your computer sound system - which doesn't do you much good if you're not in front of the computer, and there is no equivalent app. 

I hesitate to say much more other than recommend perhaps watching some YouTube videos or doing some web searches.  For both Ham and JT alert, there are many configuration options that reflect your personal taste in how you like it set up, not to mention that the things you want to be alerted to or track are going to be different.