RBN Spot Counts, CQ WPX CW 2017

To get an idea of the efficacy of the Red Pitaya skimmer set-up, I pulled spot counts from the RBN via screen grabs off of the ‘Spots Analysis Tool’.  During the 2016 contest the skimmer station at W4KAZ was run with softrocks as the skimmer SDR, skimming only 160m/80m/40m/20m.  15m was better during 2016 than 2017, but the softrock for 15m was not reliable enough to run during a contest.

With that caveat, the W4KAZ spot  counts from 2017 are quite a bit better than those from 2016.  This reflects skimming 6 bands in 2017 as well as improvements  due to Red Pitaya vs Softrocks(2016 skimming was for only 160/80/40/20)

Spot counts from RBN for the CQ WPX CW of 2016/2017.  They are grouped by continent and sorted from high to low spot counts.

There are 4,489,640 total RBN spots for the period of the 2016 contest.

There are 4,431,759 total RBN spots for the period of the 2017 contest.

http://w4kaz.com/images/pages/skimmer_spot_counts_wpx_saturday.htm

http://w4kaz.com/images/pages/skimmer_spot_counts_wpx_sunday.htm

Despite a similarity in the total number of spots, the spot distribution shows the counts for Europe significantly higher in 2017 vs 2016.  In North America, the spot counts on