Peter Goodhall, 2E0SQL - M3PHP » cluster

Launch of DXCluster.co.uk

Peter — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:11:13 +0000

Just under a week ago Paul (M0TZO) said that he’d found a domain available and I’d love it.. He wasn’t wrong either the domain in question was http://www.dxcluster.co.uk I’ve spent some time getting a prototype of the website up and running using a lot of the back-end code which was already in place on DXAnywhere.com.

The features for the site is open for comments either post them in the comments below or use the feedback tab on the site. I’ll be posting some more news in the feature about progress being made.

Cluster Spots & Google Maps

Peter — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:08:47 +0000

I spent some time yesterday adding a new feature to DXAnywhere this being the ability to see DX Cluster spots on a Google Map, after a little researching on how the Google Maps API works I had a prototype on-line before lunch and got feed back within a couple of minutes of posting the website address on Twitter (1,2).

After this I set about developing the system further adding the Great circle lines and the ability to select a band you’d like to monitor for spots, the system actually displays the last 10 spots and refreshes every 20 seconds so the information is relativity current. Both the spotter and the dx station is plotted at the moment this is using the same style of pins but I hope to change this to ones a bit more amateur radio related.

After watching it for a couple of hours its been interesting to see whos being working K5D visually instead of looking at a data table. You can find the cluster map at http://www.dxanywhere.com/cluster/map while your there do take a look at the rest of the site theres lots on offer! more so when you register.

DXAnywhere

Peter — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:06:29 +0000

Its been a while since I talked about DXAnywhere, so I’ve decided to post an update on the progress of the whole system, back at the start of October I gave a short presentation about DXAnywhere at the RSGB HFC at that point the system was still in Alpha mode and rather buggy to say the least!

This isn’t the case any more the DX cluster system is stable and collecting spots as they come in, these are being stored in MySQL so they can be used for any purpose, which at the moment is displaying the latest spots and also providing an alerts system.

Once you have registered its possible to create an alert based on a callsign and band your wanting to work them on, once we come across the callsign in our database the system sends out an automatic email to alert you.

We’re also working on showing statistics to include data like

Total number of spots yearly, monthly
Spots on an hourly basis based on band

Apart from the cluster aspect of the system, we have a small social networking engine which allows you to create a provide and include lots of information about your ham radio activity which can be viewed by everyone, you can also become friends with other users of the system. There’s also a few other interesting features to be found once you start playing around.

What is now in early stage of development is the mobile website for DXAnywhere which can be found at http://www.dxanywhere.com/m/ which allows you to view cluster spots and setup new alerts, more features are in the pipe line.

The development doesn’t stop here though we’re activity developing more features to make DXing more enjoyable and allowing you to find information about stations easily, in the next release you’ll be able to click on the callsigns on the cluster page and it will give you details like DXCC, last time they we’re spotted, and any other details we can dig up about them, but again some of this data will need to come from other websites so we’re relying on third party API’s.

Please do go check DXAnywhere.com out and feel free to use the system and tell your friends we’re always open to suggestions so either leave a comment or send me an email.