Introducing the RBN Dashboard
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been developing a companion tool to the UK HF Propagation Dashboard, a new page called the RBN Dashboard. This addition focuses on visualising real-time amateur radio activity reported through the Reverse Beacon Network (RBN).
The RBN is an extraordinary, community-driven system of automated receivers (“skimmers”) that continuously listen for CW (Morse code) and digital signals on the HF bands. Every time a station calls CQ, these skimmers detect the signal, decode the callsign, and post a report to the central RBN servers, including signal strength, frequency, and the time of reception. The data is entirely public and freely available at reversebeacon.net, and I’m very grateful to the RBN community and its operators for making such a valuable dataset openly accessible.
The RBN Dashboard doesn’t replace the main HF Predictor, but complements it. Where the main predictor combines solar and ionospheric indices with observed activity to produce an interpreted propagation picture, the RBN view shows what is actually being heard right now, based purely on live reports. You can filter the results by band, region (“heard by” or “reporter”), and time window, typically the past few minutes to get an immediate sense of which paths are open.
What makes this interesting is the contrast between prediction and observation. The two tools now share a similar layout, so it’s easy to switch between them. If the HF Predictor suggests that 20 m is likely to be open towards Europe, and the RBN Dashboard shows a sudden cluster of reports confirming that, you can have much greater confidence in the band’s real-world behaviour.
All the analysis, filtering, and presentation are handled locally on the dashboard. The RBN data itself is untouched — what you see is my own method of interpreting and displaying it in a way I hope operators will find useful. It’s still an experiment, but one that I think adds an important “live” dimension to the overall project.
You can explore the new RBN Dashboard at
https://hf-predictor.g4eid-km8h.net/rbn-dashboard.html
As always, feedback and suggestions are very welcome.
Mark.