Consume live CW/RTTY/digital skimmer spots by connecting to a Reverse Beacon Network telnet feed
domain: reversebeacon.net · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Open a raw TCP connection to telnet.reversebeacon.net (or the alternate node arcluster.reversebeacon.net) on port 7000.
When prompted, log in with your amateur radio callsign; this feed is intended primarily for AR-Cluster/CC-Cluster node operators redistributing spots, not casual end users.
Parse the line-delimited spot records for fields including the spotting skimmer's callsign, the spotted callsign, frequency, and CW speed/WPM where applicable.
Track the quality tag on each spot (e.g. unverified single spot vs. multiply-confirmed) to decide whether to trust an individual spot or wait for corroboration.
Maintain a persistent connection to receive the continuous real-time stream rather than attempting to poll it.
Known gotchas
RBN's telnet aggregator is explicitly intended to feed cluster software for onward 'retail' distribution, not as a general-purpose consumer API; expect volume and formatting suited to that use case.
There is no published rate limit or SLA for this feed; build in reconnect/backoff logic for an unstable or dropped session.
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