RBN Live — About

What is RBN Live?

RBN Live shows recent HF activity from Reverse Beacon Network (CW) and FT8 skimmer-like sources in a rolling time window. Cards summarise activity by country; the Details panel lists individual spots.

DX vs DE (what the “side” means)

• DE — heard stations: country = where the heard station is located. Details column Heard (by) shows HEARD CALL (REPORTER).
• DX — reporters: country = where the reporting station (skimmer) is located. Details column Reporter (heard) shows REPORTER CALL (HEARD).

Time window, band & mode filters

The time window is user-selectable and applied consistently across the grid and details. Band and mode filters restrict both the country aggregation and the spot list.

Country cards vs Details

• Country cards: show unique calls and total spots within the window.
• Details panel: shows individual spots (time-ordered) for the selected country.
• Why samples may differ: timing (spots aging in/out), role changes (heard↔reporter), or samples being a preview subset.

Auto-refresh

Auto-refresh runs at half the selected window (min 30s). The last refresh timestamp is shown in the header.

Known limitations

• RBN callsigns and geocoding occasionally use shorthand or ambiguous country mappings.
• Very high spot rates may truncate details to the configured limit.

Credits

Thanks to Reverse Beacon Network and the FT8 reporting community. This page is part of the UK HF Propagation Dashboard (Experimental).