WSPR Without Tears
This gives the particulars for the contacts – their gridsquares and the distance traveled. (Multiply km by
0.62 to get miles.)
Downloading Data
We're fascinated to see how far our signal goes using just a piece of wire strung around the room (that's
all we've done with our antenna). It's also interesting to see the effect of daytime vs nighttime on
propagation.
After you've run your transmitter for a while you might be tempted to play with the data some more.
The WSPRnet people have stored information on all of the transmissions in files that you can download
and process. This is under the
Downloads
tab. The files are stored by
year-month
. They are available in
gzip or zip format.
Pick a month that you'd like to investigate and click on the word
zip
. We're amused by what can only be
described as wishful thinking on the part of the people who put together the web page. The writeup at
the top says “Compressed file sizes range from 1-20MB.” The compressed files will be much closer to
300 MB and uncompressed go to about 1.4 GB.
Most of the entries were not information we cared about – they list
all
of the contacts in a particular
month. We only want to see our contacts.
WSPR Data Filter
We wrote a program to extract only our contacts. The program is called
WSPR_Data_Filter.exe
and can
be downloaded from the web site (part of the executables file). The program removes everything but
your contacts from the downloaded data making it a
much
more reasonably-sized file.
TAPR (c) 2018-2019 “WSPR Without Tears” 19 Of 20 Version 2.1
05/20/2019
Figure 12: WSPR Data Filter
