my Lock down project

[VK5PJ]

Hi to you all,
  during June / July 2021 we have in VK and ZL experienced unprecedented propagation into the greater EU and parts of Asia on 50 MHz.  To keep track of this activity and provide an early warning for me, I have started to use an online data warehouse called 'hamalert'
This provides notifications via a number of channels, including email and a mobile phone app.
In there is also the ability to send alerts in the form of HTTP POST or HTTP GET traffic to a private web site.  As I wanted to start to compile my own customized record of the activity from with VK to outside DXCC entities I thought I would see if I could fathom out how to create my own private datastore of spots for future reference.
So I have a web hosting package with Netorigin, which was bought out by another company ( xxx), this gives me web space, a domain name and access to multiple SQL databases I can create and customize.  Also included is the PHP scripting engine so I can write some embedded code in web pages and have that code read or write to a database.
Okay that sounds all very easy but I had never done this before as a clean sheet project.  I have fiddled with other peoples code to customize it but this was to be a a fully custom application ( Gulp ).

Grrrr having problems saving my text here as I post it, lost the last 20 minutes of typing.

I created a MySQL database on my hosted web service, assembled some PHP code (mostly cobbled together from others code) and tested.. I can now view the last 20 DX spots from my database at this web address : https://vk5pj.com/php/read-last20.php

more as I progress.

[VK2ZRH]

Thanks for posting, Peter. I think you have articulated a very good (as in useful) idea.

I used to use the data collection facilities of the old VKspotter to analyse 50 MHz and 144 MHz DX reports, which proved most useful in propagation studies that I did. They revealed a quite puzzling sporadic E "MUF enhancement" effect that I was able to attribute to "petit chordal hop" in the ionospheric sporadic E.

Keep on coding!

[VK5PJ]

Following on from the 1st post, the feed of data I receive is customised by the Hamalert web system before I receive it, In this way I do not have to do that part of data filtering myself.

In essence, the data coming to me is, any VK or ZL that works any DXCC entitiy other than VK, ZL or JA will get sent to my database.
I deliberately chose to filter out contacts with Japan as they are usually plentiful and would be just a distraction from the intended purpose,
which is getting to 100 countries confirmed on 50 MHz.

For those who may want to use the database as it grows in size, there is link that gives a CSV style output which you can massage to your hearts content: https://vk5pj.com/php/readdb-csv.php

For my project I have a PHP page that process the HTTP POST data from Hamalert and this puts it into the database automatically and the other scripts are all about formatting the data for humans to read. Each of these scripts will no doubt evolve over time and I am open to constructive ideas from others.

My only regret is that I waited till the end of the activity to get this going and it is now sitting idle...  I wish I had done this back in May and
it would have been wonderful to have a log of all the happenings VK wide.

It will be interesting to see how it performs over our summer Es season and the eventual upturn of the solar cycle (yes I am counting my chickens early)

[VK2AZ]

Well done Peter,
It's fun doing stuff like this.

What I would like to find is an open API with all that data so I could make a real-time customisable feed for VKSpotter so you could select exactly what data you require.

Keep up the great work.

Hilary

--