Dear MVUSers -- At a couple of club meetings we've discussed Bob, K8TQK's, idea for a network to monitor VHF propagation by automatically listening for and reporting beacon reception. This weekend we got a "proof of concept" version of that system installed at the "Hill" contest site, and we had it running during the contest. I'm happy to report that it worked surprisingly well. On 20 and 21 January (GMT) we reported 4 stations on 6M, 10 on 2M, and 2 on 70cm to the Reverse Beacon Network. That's not bad considering that the antennas (especially on 2M and 70cm) were only about 20 feet off the ground and had long runs of RG6 coax. And considering that there were high power transmitters banging away in the same building on 50 through 1296 MHz! You can see recent spots from N8ZM by going to: http://www.reversebeacon.net/dxsd1/dxsd1.php?f=0&c=N8ZM&t=de If you look this week, you'll see a bunch of garbage because we don't have the software properly configured to filter out errors, like thinking that a grid square is a call sign. I will fix that on the next trip to the hill. The system has the following parts: 1. Windows computer running CW Skimmer Server and Skimmer Aggregator software. The current (temporary) machine is a laptop with an i5 processor. 2. Rasperry Pi 3 computer running Linux and "rtl_hpsdr" software. 3. RTL-SDR.com "dongle" USB receivers (one for each 192kHz band segment monitored -- currently, we are using 4 to cover 6M, two segments on 2M, and 70cm). 4. 7 port USB hub with 4A power supply that the dongles plug into. 8. Internet connection (minimal bandwidth required... less than 100 bytes for each spot sent). The antennas are currently stacked halos for 2M and 70cm about 20 feet in the air, and a single halo for 6M about 25 feet up. They're fed with RG6 cable TV coax. Plans are to raise those higher, and also to put preamps at the antennas to overcome the feedline loss. There's still some fine-tuning to be done, but I think this will be a worthwhile project, particularly if we can get several of these monitoring stations installed at various places. 73, John