How to connect DXSpider to RBN

Configuring your DXSpider node receive skimmer spots from the RBN (Reverse Beacon Network) is very straight forward, here is bare bones howto:

Create two RBN users:

set/rbn rbn-cw rbn-ft8

Create two connect scripts:

/spider/connect/rbn-cw

which contains:

connect telnet telnet.reversebeacon.net 7000
'call:' '<YOUR-CALL-SIGN>'
client rbn skimmer

and:

/spider/connect/rbn-ft8

which contains:

connect telnet telnet.reversebeacon.net 7001
'call:' '<YOUR-CALL-SIGN>'
client rbn skimmer

Then in your crontab file:

/spider/local_cmd/crontab

Add these two lines:

* * * * * start_connect('rbn-cw') unless connected('rbn-cw')
* * * * * start_connect('rbn-ft8') unless connected('rbn-ft8')

You can also startup the connections manually in the normal way:

connect rbn-cw
connect rbn-ft8

and of course drop the connections:

disconnect rbn-cw
disconnect rbn-ft8

Although bear in mind if you added the crontab entries, disconnecting them will only work until the crontab fire the next connect command, so you would need to remove or comment out the two lines in the crontab file to permanently disconnect.

More details can be found on the RBN Mojo page.