My Thanksgiving 2024 radio project has been to set up an FT8 listening operation.
I have OpenWebRX+ running an automated decode of FT8 signals on 40 meters, feeding pskreporter. The hardware is a Youloop antenna, an Airspy HF+ Discovery SDR, and a Pi 400 server.
So far in less than a week I've heard transmissions from 60 countries.
A next challenge is to sort out a receive schedule. 40 meters is great at night but not much use during the day. The OpenWebRX+ scheduler also lets me set a "greyline" (sunrise/sunset) operation. So there's more tweaking to be done, to predict what part of the bands I should be listening to when.
For analysis of the logs, I am leaning on pskreporter's export of data in ADIF format, and then turning to the "ADIF Multitool" command line tool at https://github.com/flwyd/adif-multitool to dump that data back on in CSV files so that I can use csvkit https://github.com/wireservice/csvkit to explore.
One thing missing from all of this is an organized way to turn grid squares into geo data like states or counties. I suspect that some callbook management software has this task tackled already, but I'm not unearthing any command line tools for it.
