Self-Spotting to regular DX cluster

PoLo - Issues & Ideas
1

Hello!

I’m new to this forum. I’ve been using POLO for a while to make it easier to spot myself on my POTA/SOTA trips.

If the QSO rate is low, posting on the regular DX Cluster sometimes helps me to make more contacts.

Currently, I’m using the DXHEAT website, but this is not an elegant solution. Is there a way I can create a self-spot with a spot message such as ‘POTA DE-0525’ from within Ham2K?

Tnx

Dietmar, DL2SBA

2

At this time, PoLo does not spot to the Cluster.
If you activate the WWFF version of the park, PoLo will also spot to the WWFF cluster at SpotLine
I often get more contacts from this (hard to prove categorically):
https://spots.wwff.co/spots
But then, I always submit to both programs (WWFF and POTA)
Alan

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3

Tnx Alan - this is a good idea!

4

Alan, yesterday, I tried your suggestion with DE-0530, but unfortunately this park is not part of the WWFF programme.

Returning to my original idea, posting to the regular DX cluster would be helpful during the off-season.

Do the experts have any comments?

5

What is the offseason? As for spotting outside of the POTA.app area, it has never been a POTA practice to use the DX cluster

6

The practical part of posting a spot to a specific cluster server is not particularly hard, but the main reason I have not yet implemented this is that it would require a not insignificant amount of “user interface” work.

PoLo would need to provide a way to manage a list of cluster servers you want to post to, along with what exactly you want to post, and which activities would be posted where.

The beauty of the spotting services associated to POTA, SOTA, etc, is that all those questions have only one answer, so it does not require any configuration.

So what I’m saying is that, yes, this is a great feature to consider, but since it requires significant work I need to prioritize it alongside all the other features I’m working on. So it will have to wait at least until we have cloud sync and a Windows version.

73 de KI2D

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7

Dear Sebastian

Many thanks for your detailed response. I had forgotten that there isn’t just one DX Cluster to post to.

I agree with you that it will require a lot of configuration dialogues to make it work for all of those HAMs.

Cloud sync and a Windows version also sound very promising.

Thanks

Dietmar, DL2SBA

8

Yup, it’s true. WWFF (Spotline) spots automatically to DX Cluster too. I added that feature after official release (basically new service running in new container). Spottin to DX Cluster too increases the QSO count a bit, I notice that I might get non-typical hunters calling me when I added that.

It would be cool to have that on PoLo, even just as “DX Cluster” activity - would be really easy to spot to DX Cluster when doing non-WWFF CQ calling. One thing to remember is that it requires “registering” the callsign to certain DX cluster instance - otherwise the spots will stay on that instance only.

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