Working JA Stations on FT8 – late evening 20m

While sitting at my radio desk and checking in on my RCARCS weekly 2m net, I fired up my HF radio and noticed at 7:30pm on 20m it sounded like there was a bunch of JT8 signals, so started up WSJT-X to take a look:

First up I noticed call sign 8J3ZNJ which is an unusual prefix I haven’t seen before, turns out this is a 50th Anniversary special event station for a Japanese ham radio club,

Calling CQ a couple of times I then picked up contacts with 3 other Japan stations. Not bad for some casual spur of the moment FT8 operation!

Revisiting my spotviz.info webapp: visualizing WSJT-X FT8 spots over time – part 3: Successful deployment: visualizing 20m spots from 9am to 10pm

I’ve successfully deployed my SpotViz app on WildFly running locally and tested running a visualization playback of FT8 signals received during a whole day, from 9am to 10pm. It’s interesting to see the propagation move from my location on the US West coast out to the East coast, and then gradually move West during the day, following the sun, until the propagation dies out on 20m completely around 10pm.

Here’s a screen capture of the playback:

Next up, I’ll be setting this up hosted on a VPS somewhere, and start working on some of the bugs in the UI.

Deploying a Jersey based web app to WildFly 8 (part 1)

I’ve been resuscitating a personal Amateur Radio related project from a few years back that I previously had hosted on RedHat’s OpenShift. It was previously deployed on WildFly 8, so before I start making changes I want to get it deployed again locally on WildFly 8.

First up I got this error:

org.jboss.weld.exceptions.DeploymentException: WELD-001408: Unsatisfied dependencies for type ServiceLocator with qualifiers @Default at injection point [BackedAnnotatedField] @Inject private org.glassfish.jersey.internal.inject.ContextInjectionResolver.serviceLocator

This error appears to be pretty common. From the suggestions posted in reply to a similar post to WildFly forum here, the suggestion was to include Glassfish dependencies. I never had these included before, so not sure why I need these now, but these did the job:

<!-- kh added for error: WELD-001408: Unsatisfied dependencies for type Set<Service> with qualifiers @Default -->
<dependency>
  <groupId>com.google.guava</groupId>
  <artifactId>guava</artifactId>
  <version>17.0</version>
</dependency>

<!-- kh: added per: https://developer.jboss.org/thread/240847 -->
<dependency
  <groupId>org.glassfish.jersey.containers.glassfish</groupId>
  <artifactId>jersey-gf-cdi</artifactId>
  <version>2.14</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.glassfish.jersey.containers</groupId>
  <artifactId>jersey-container-servlet</artifactId>
  <version>2.14</version>
</dependency>

The odd thing is if I deploy to WildFly 8.2 I don’t get this error or need these additional dependencies. Anyway, all set for now. I just tested deploying to 17.0.1 with no additional changes needed either.

Revisiting my spotviz.info webapp: visualizing WSJT-X FT8 spots over time

A few years back I built an AngularJS webapp for visualizing JT65/JT9 spots over a period of time, logged as you run the WSJT-X app to decode FT8 signals you receive at your station. At the time I had it deployed on RedHat’s OpenShift, running in a couple of ‘gears’: one for JBoss hosting a REST API backend, a queue and MDB for processing uploaded spots, and one for a MongoDB database to store the collected spot info. Unfortunately the ‘bronze’ basic plan which was an incredible good deal for hosting apps at the time (at around $1 a month if I remember right) was discontinued, and the replacement plans were multiple times the cost, so I discontinued the app and didn’t redeploy it again after that.

At some point thought I was planning on taking another look at deploying it elsewhere, and if I’m going to pick it up again, I might as well take a look at refreshing the architecture. Here’s what the original v1 deployment looked like:

For personal projects I typically build them using some api or technology I want to get more familiar with. I remember at the time I had a need to refresh myself on JAX-WS SOAP based webservices, so the client that is monitoring the WSJT-X log file and uploading to the serverside for processing is a generated JAX-WS client to a webservice deployed in front of a queue; it receives the messages sent from the client and adds them to the queue for processing. If I had to refresh this part there’s no real need for this to be as heavy as JAX-WS and could be simpler with a simple REST api, so that’s probably how I’ll update that part.

I’m interested in something like Apache Kafka can be used to process high volumes of incoming data, so this might be a good refresh for the serverside queue and MDB.

I remember putting a lot of time into building my animated map display of received spots in the AngularJS app. This was back in 2015 I think, so this could probably do with a refresh to at least the latest/current Angular version, which would be a considerable rewrite I think. I’ll take a look.

Anyway, I haven’t run any part of this even locally in development for years, so that will be my first steps, get it up and running, and then start incrementally updating some of the parts.

This project is related to my recent experiments with getting WSJT-X and a SDRPlay RSP2 running on a Raspberry Pi, as a low cost FT8 monitoring station, so now that part is up and running, time to work on the software side again.