What use is an F-call?

With the advance of the Internet into society in the past 20-odd years Amateur Radio has embraced the warm glow of electrons passing across copper, or light pulses across fibre, and radio waves across the ether that embodies our Internet today.

One of the tools that a radio amateur might use is a thing called a DX Cluster. It's a place online where you'll find records of contacts that have been made between two stations. The time the contact took place, the date and of course the frequency.

If we leave accuracy aside for a moment, since anyone and everyone can post a spot online without any form of serious authentication, we can never the less use this tool for some interesting purposes.

The obvious one is to use a DX Cluster to see who's where on what band and see if you can hear them there too. You'll find that there is some limited success and some indications of where a station might be found.

If you look regularly at a particular station, you may be able to figure out patterns of when they're likely to operate and on what band.

I'm an unashamed computer geek. I've been playing with databases since the late 80's and so massaging some data is part of my DNA.

I wondered if you extracted a bunch of DX Cluster records, if you could find out something interesting with the resulting data.

So here's what I did.

I queried the cluster for the past 10 thousand records containing vk6 anywhere in the record. This essentially resulted in a record of claimed amateur contacts going back one year. I stuck the data into a spreadsheet and spent some time massaging the data, that is, filtering out the day of the week, the hour, the month, the year, etc.

I then created some pivot tables to see if I could see any patterns.

Given that I'm on 40, 15 and 10m, I focussed only on those bands. Of the three, the most popular band is 10m, then 15m, followed by 40m - representing about one third of the number of contacts claimed on 10m. The most contacts are made on a Saturday, followed by Sunday, then Friday. On 40m, the most contacts are made between 5 and 7am local time. On 15m the most contacts were made between 8 and 10pm. On 10m between 3 and 8pm. On 10m the most contacts were made in October, on 15m in October and November and on 80m in July and August. 

Let me be the first to say that this is not a complete picture by any means. There is nothing in what I've told you that takes into account solar activity, contests or many other spurious influences, like a rare DX station changing the numbers.

What other tools have you come across that might help another amateur?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB