PSK Reporter Live Feed in DX Reminder: Alarms Within Seconds

The five sources that DX Reminder watches are not equal in speed. Some show a spot as soon as a person types it, while others depend on receivers that report automatically in batches. The most interesting case is PSK Reporter, which collects reception reports from stations all over the world. This article explains how the PSK Reporter live feed in the LY4A DX Reminder app works, why it used to be slow, how it was changed to bring the alarm within seconds of a receiver hearing your callsign, and what the status line and the settings tell you. It also shows how to decide whether the live feed suits the way you chase DX.

What PSK Reporter Adds to the Other Sources

DX Reminder watches five public services: DXScape, DXSummit, DXHeat, PSK Reporter and Reverse Beacon. The first three mostly show spots from the DX clusters, in which an operator or a program reports that a station has been heard. PSK Reporter and the Reverse Beacon Network work differently. They are networks of automatic receivers, and every time such a receiver decodes a callsign it sends a report. You can read the general background on PSK Reporter, and our own article on how PSK Reporter shows who hears your signal describes the map and the filters.

For a DX chaser this is valuable, because the receiver reports do not depend on someone’s decision to spot the station. A DXpedition operating FT8 or FT4 is decoded by hundreds of stations at once, and the reports flow in whether or not any human has posted a cluster spot. The Reverse Beacon Network does the same for CW and RTTY, as explained in the guide to CW Skimmer and the Reverse Beacon Network. For modes like FT8, PSK Reporter is often the first place where a rare station shows up.

Why Reports Used to Arrive Late

The difficulty is the way the reports are published. A PSK Reporter receiver sends its reports in batches, and the service releases them in batches too. As a result, a report is never fresh: nothing arrives under a minute old, and the flow has a built-in delay. In the early versions of the app, the reception reports from PSK Reporter were asked for every few minutes, and because of the delay in publication the app sometimes discarded them as stale. In the version history of the app, this is described as a fix in version 3.3: the reports are published in batches and are always a few minutes old, and the app used to throw them away, so the source looked silent while its data was fine.

Even after that fix, the approach had a limit. If the app asks every few minutes and the reports are delayed on top of that, the alarm can be well behind the event. On a phone, before the live connection, an alarm could arrive up to a quarter of an hour after the callsign was first heard. For a rare station that is on the air for twenty minutes, this is the difference between a log entry and a missed chance.

The Change: a Live Connection

PSK Reporter offers a second way to receive reports, a live stream over MQTT, a light messaging protocol for streams of small messages that you can read about in the article on MQTT. Instead of asking the server again and again, the app opens a connection to a broker and subscribes to the reports for the callsigns on your list. When a receiver reports one of them, the message is passed on to the app at once.

The app made this step in two stages, as the list of changes shows. The Windows and macOS versions got it first, in version 1.5 of the desktop app: they listen to the same reports over MQTT and hear a callsign within seconds of a receiver reporting it. If the connection is unavailable, the normal queries return on their own, so nothing is lost. The Android app followed in version 3.7: the live feed works on the phone as well, the reports reach the phone the moment a receiver hears the callsign, and the alarm goes off at once rather than waiting for the next check, which, as the log of changes states, could previously be a quarter of an hour behind.

Seeing That the Feed Is Live

A feed that runs in the background needs a visible sign that it is working. In version 3.8 of the Android app, the status line says PSKR live while the connection to the broker is up. Before this addition there was no way to tell whether the feed had connected or had quietly fallen back to queries. Now you can look at the status line before an important opening and confirm that the live source is active. If the text is missing, the app is using the ordinary queries, which are slower but still working.

The table below puts the three ways of getting PSK Reporter data side by side, as they apply to the app.

The Live Feed and the Check Interval

The live feed does not replace the check interval, but it changes its meaning. The app still checks the other sources every 1, 5, 10 or 30 minutes, as you chose, because the cluster spots come from sources that are queried. The PSK Reporter reports, on the other hand, are delivered as they arrive. This is why a callsign that is first heard by a receiver may produce an alarm before any cluster has a spot, even with the longest interval.

It also matters for the repeat setting. A busy FT8 expedition is reported by many receivers within seconds, and without a rule the phone would ring dozens of times. The app gives one alarm for the newest of these reports for each callsign, band and mode, and you choose how often the same station may ring again: on every new spot, or every 1, 5, 10, 30 or 60 minutes. With the live feed, a longer repeat time is a good idea for a rare station, so that you have the first alarm at once and are not disturbed by the following ones while you operate. Read how to set this in our article on automating DX spot alerts.

Which Modes Benefit Most

The live feed is most useful for the digital modes that PSK Reporter receives: FT8 and FT4 above all. These modes run in fixed 15-second and 7.5-second cycles, and a DXpedition in Fox and Hound mode works many stations quickly. If you wait for the cluster, you may learn about the station after the opening has gone. With the live feed, the alarm comes within seconds of the first decode, and you can switch on the radio and start to call. Our guide to the FT8 DXpedition mode explains how to work such a station when you reach it.

For CW and SSB the situation is different. The Reverse Beacon Network and the cluster spots matter more there, and the PSK Reporter feed adds only what digital receivers hear. This is why the app keeps all five sources active at the same time. The reminder you made for 20 m CW still uses the sources that carry CW, and a reminder for 20 m FT8 benefits from the live feed. Keeping bands and modes apart, as the app does, means that each reminder gets the sources suited to it.

Switching the Live Feed Off

The live feed can be switched off under the sources in the settings. There are good reasons to do so in some cases. A phone with very limited data or a poor connection may prefer to rely on the regular checks, and a user who wants to keep the battery use as low as possible may choose the same. Also, if you watch a callsign that is never active on the digital modes, the live source brings nothing, and you can leave it off. Remember that switching it off does not mean losing PSK Reporter: the app returns to its normal queries, with the delays described above.

If you are unsure, test both ways. Add a callsign that is active on FT8 at this moment, with the live feed on, and watch how quickly the alarm arrives. Then repeat with the feed off, using a different active station. The difference in time will show you what the live feed gives in your own conditions.

A Typical Evening With the Live Feed

To see how this works in practice, imagine that a DXpedition announced for the weekend is on your list with reminders for 20 m FT8, 17 m FT8 and 15 m FT4. You are cooking dinner with the phone on the table. At some point a station in Europe decodes the expedition on 17 m and the report goes to PSK Reporter. Within seconds the report reaches your phone over the live connection, the alarm sounds and you see the callsign, the band and the mode in the notification. You walk to the radio, switch on, and by the time the first cluster spot appears, you are already calling. Without the live feed, the first sign might have arrived several minutes later, perhaps at the moment when the pile-up had formed.

The same logic works for a local opening. If a path to the Pacific opens for ten minutes on 15 m, the first receivers that hear the station are those near the other end of the path or in between. Their reports are the earliest evidence that the band is open towards that station. The live feed gives you this information as it appears, and then your own decision follows: if the band is open for the reporting receivers, it is worth trying, and if the reports come only from a very different direction, you may stay at dinner.

What It Cannot Do

A live feed is only as good as the receivers that supply it. If no receiver within range of the station hears it, there is no report, and the alarm does not come. A rare station on a band with few receivers, or a path that is open only to a few places in the world, may be heard by nobody who reports to PSK Reporter. In such a case the cluster spots and the Reverse Beacon Network remain the sources to watch. And since everybody who uses these services can see the same data, a station that is spotted in this way will also attract a pile-up very quickly, so the first alarm is only the start of the work. Our guide to working a pile-up as a chaser covers what to do next.

Privacy and the Live Feed

To receive the reports for your callsigns, the app must tell the service which callsigns it is interested in, as it does with every other source. As the privacy page of LY4A states, each request carries the callsign being looked for, and these services see the request and the internet address it came from and handle it under their own rules. Nothing else leaves the device in the Android, Windows and macOS apps. The iPhone app works through the LY4A website, which does the watching for the phone and sends a notification, as the privacy page describes.

The Bottom Line

PSK Reporter reports are published in batches, so a plain query is always late by minutes. DX Reminder fixes this by listening to the live stream over MQTT, which brings the report to the app within seconds on Windows and macOS since version 1.5 and on Android since version 3.7, with the status line showing PSKR live while the connection is up. If the connection is not available, the app returns to its normal queries. Combine the live feed with a sensible repeat time, keep the other sources active for CW and SSB, and use the setting to switch the feed off only when data use or the battery calls for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the PSK Reporter live feed in DX Reminder?

It is a live connection over MQTT that passes PSK Reporter reception reports to the app as soon as they are published, instead of asking for them every few minutes.

Why were PSK Reporter alerts late before?

The reports are published in batches and are always at least a minute old, and the app only asked for them at intervals. On a phone the alarm could be up to a quarter of an hour behind.

How do I know the live feed is working?

On Android the status line says PSKR live while the connection to the broker is up. If it does not, the app is using the ordinary queries.

What happens if the live connection fails?

The app returns to its normal queries automatically, so reports still arrive, only with a longer delay.

Can I switch the live feed off?

Yes, under the sources in the settings. The app then relies on regular checks for PSK Reporter.

Does the live feed help with CW and SSB?

Less than with FT8 and FT4. CW is covered mainly by the Reverse Beacon Network and cluster spots, which the app watches in parallel.