WSPR is a digital weak-signal mode developed by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Joe Taylor, K1JT. A WSPR transmitter sends a precisely encoded two-minute burst containing the station’s callsign, Maidenhead grid square, and transmit power. The signal is narrow enough — only about 6 Hz wide — that it can be decoded by receiving stations even when it is well below the noise floor, as much as 28 dB below what a human ear could detect. Receiving stations around the world run WSPR decoding software continuously and upload every decoded spot to a global database, wspr.live, which records millions of spots per day from thousands of stations on every HF band.

For a club WSPR beacon, this means that every two minutes, the transmitter announces itself to the world and the world silently reports back exactly who heard it, from where, and how well. No operator attention is required.

The club’s group monitoring page, available at wspr.wb2mnfai.org, shows all club member stations that are currently running WSPR beacons. The page updates automatically and presents a unified view of how the club’s collective signal footprint is performing.

For each station the summary table shows:

• First and last spot times — when the station was first heard and most recently heard, displayed in Eastern time
• Total spot count — how many times the station has been decoded across the reporting window
• Best DX station — the farthest receiving station that decoded the signal
• Maximum distance — the greatest distance achieved, in kilometers

Below the table, two bar charts compare all stations side by side on maximum distance and total spot count, making it easy to see at a glance how conditions or station setups differ across the group.

An AI-powered analysis section at the bottom of the group page uses Claude (Anthropic’s AI model) to compare all stations and highlight notable differences in propagation performance, trends, and conditions. Members can also type a free-form question — “when did WB2MNF first reach Europe?” or “which station has the best efficiency?” — and receive a detailed answer drawn from the archived spot data. Questions are restricted to WSPR and propagation topics.

Clicking any callsign on the group page opens that station’s full propagation report. This is where the detail lives. Six summary statistics are shown at the top of the page:

• Total Spots and Unique Receivers — overall activity and geographic spread
• Max Distance and Best SNR — peak performance figures
• Average km/W — how many kilometers per watt the station is achieving on average, a classic amateur radio efficiency metric
• SpotQ — a composite quality score developed by wspr.rocks that combines distance, transmit power, and signal-to-noise ratio into a single number. Higher SpotQ means the station is achieving impressive DX relative to the power it is using.

The interactive propagation map plots every receiving station as a colored dot, with color indicating signal strength: green for strong signals, amber for moderate, red for weak. Clicking a dot shows that receiver’s callsign, grid square, distance, and SNR. A time filter slider lets the viewer scrub through the day or week and watch the signal footprint expand and contract as the ionosphere changes — the moment a band opens to Europe or the Pacific is clearly visible as new dots appear far from home.

Below the map, the Top DX Receivers table lists the stations that heard the signal at the greatest distances, along with their bearing (N, NE, E, etc.), best SNR, spot count, and individual SpotQ scores. The bearing labels make it immediately clear whether propagation is favoring Europe to the northeast, the Pacific to the west, or South America to the southeast.

A time-of-day bar chart shows activity by local hour — how many spots were recorded in each hour of the day, displayed in the viewer’s local time zone. This reveals the daily rhythm of propagation: when the band opens in the morning, when it peaks, and when it goes long in the evening.

Four additional visualization panels provide deeper insight:

• Receivers by Distance — a histogram bucketing all hearing stations into distance bands (under 500 km out to over 10,000 km), showing at a glance whether propagation is mostly local, regional, or intercontinental
• SNR Distribution — a color-coded histogram from strong (green) to weak (red) showing the character of the propagation; a spread toward stronger signals indicates an active band opening
• Signal Compass — an SVG compass rose divided into 16 directional sectors showing which bearings the signal is reaching. The size and color of each wedge reflects how many stations in that direction are hearing the transmission.
• Frequency Drift Distribution — a histogram of how stable the transmitter’s frequency is during each two-minute WSPR cycle. A well-disciplined oscillator shows nearly all spots at zero drift; a drifty transmitter degrades decode rates and SpotQ scores.

Propagation on the HF bands is driven largely by conditions in the ionosphere, which in turn is driven by the Sun. The station page fetches live space weather data and displays six key indicators:

• Solar Flux Index (SFI) — the primary indicator of ionospheric health; higher values mean a denser F-layer and better long-distance propagation on the higher bands
• K-index and A-index — measures of geomagnetic disturbance; elevated values indicate storms that absorb HF signals, particularly on polar paths
• X-ray Flux — solar flare activity; X-class flares cause Sudden Ionospheric Disturbances (SID) that can black out HF on the sunlit side of the Earth for minutes to hours
• Solar Wind Speed — fast solar wind compresses the magnetosphere and elevates storm risk
• Bz (IMF) — the north–south component of the interplanetary magnetic field; a sustained southward Bz is the key trigger for geomagnetic storms

Hovering over any space weather tile shows a plain-language explanation of what that metric means and why it matters for HF propagation. A band condition summary translates all six indicators into a plain assessment of current conditions for 30m through 10m.

The system maintains a rolling 30-day archive of raw spot data for each club station. This archive is updated hourly around the clock and is what powers the AI question-and-answer feature — the AI has access to every individual spot record including receiver callsign, country, distance, SNR, time of day, and bearing. A nightly job at 6 AM pre-fetches fresh data for every station in the group so that no overnight spots are ever lost, even for stations whose pages are rarely visited. Individual station map pages are refreshed on demand when visited, served from a local cache that is rebuilt automatically when it is more than ten minutes old.

All of this runs on an OpenClaw AI server that also updates other parts of the Skunkworks website, accessible from anywhere through a secure Cloudflare tunnel.

W2MMD  ·  Gloucester County Amateur Radio Club  ·  w2mmd.org  ·  Spring 2026