[ParksOnTheAir] New bridge

[s0lesurviv0r]

Parks On The Air is an amateur radio event. The POTA website offers a spotting network to see who's activating what parks and where. This bridge utilizes the spotting network's JSON api to return as an RSS feed.

[dvikan]

https://api.pota.us/spot/activator doesn't return anything useful. Api not working?

[s0lesurviv0r]

The ParksOnTheAir api provides real-time spots of operators as reported by users. If there are no user reports then this API will return an empty list. I just checked this endpoint and got:

[
  {
    "spotId": 2917014,
    "activator": "K7CAR",
    "activatorLastSpotTime": "2022-03-24T05:02:15",
    "activatorLastComments": "Broadcast fired up.  Moved...will listen.",
    "frequency": "7172",
    "mode": "SSB",
    "reference": "K-0676",
    "parkName": null,
    "spotTime": "2022-03-24T05:09:09",
    "spotter": "K6YYL",
    "comments": "There now. Listening but you are a lighter copy than the other ham.",
    "source": "Web",
    "invalid": null,
    "name": "Lake Mead National Recreation Area",
    "locationDesc": "US-AZ,US-NV",
    "grid4": "DM26",
    "grid6": "DM26oa",
    "latitude": 36.0099,
    "longitude": -114.797,
    "count": 39,
    "expire": 1800
  },
  {
    "spotId": 2917013,
    "activator": "JF7RJM/7",
    "activatorLastSpotTime": null,
    "activatorLastComments": null,
    "frequency": "7005.5",
    "mode": "CW",
    "reference": "JA-0009",
    "parkName": null,
    "spotTime": "2022-03-24T05:08:45",
    "spotter": "JH7CSU1-#",
    "comments": "RBN 26 dB 20 WPM via JH7CSU1-#",
    "source": "RBN",
    "invalid": null,
    "name": "Bandai-Asahi National Park",
    "locationDesc": "JP-FS,JP-NI,JP-YT",
    "grid4": "PM97",
    "grid6": "PM97ut",
    "latitude": 37.8229,
    "longitude": 139.74,
    "count": 2,
    "expire": 1776
  }
]

[Bockiii]

Is the cache timeout of 1 minute actually necessary? Do you know how long the entries stay in the api?

[Bockiii]

I'm torn.

On the one hand, the bridge works and probably does what it's supposed to do. I can summise that from the code and the website behind it.

On the other hand, this bridge will return 0 items 99.99% of the time, which makes it a biiiitch for automated testing (no result is usually not a good sign) and also for just general use. If I'm a user, starting off with this bridge, I would not be confident that the bridge works, as... there is no feed at all.

I think it would make more sense to crawl the "activations" page and put those scheduled objects into items, but I think they are dynamic, so it will require some additional work.

I haven't landed on one or the other yet. What do others think? @yamanq @dvikan @em92 @VerifiedJoseph

[yamanq]

https://api.pota.app/spot/activator is the endpoint used by pota.app, which is the link I get to when I click "POTA Spots" on the parksontheair.com page. While the api.pota.us endpoint returns null, this one returns many more results for me.

If this endpoint is also empty at times, one solution could be generating a static feed item when there are no results but the request status code is 200. It would have the same uid every time so that RSS clients could keep the item out of view.

Regarding the cache timeout, I think it is fine considering the POTA webapp refreshes its own data (including several more API calls than just /spot/activator) every 60 seconds too.

[s0lesurviv0r]

https://api.pota.app/spot/activator provides the real-time spots. I believe the other API that you found contains the scheduled activations. They aren't taken as seriously because not everyone follows through on their planned activations. It's more beneficial to get a feed of people that are actually confirmed to be on the air.

The 60 second cache timeout was set to not overload the API. There is no need to have second-to-second updates. There is no need for someone to pounce on the a new activator. The activators stay on for quite a while, up to hours. Additionally if someone ends their activation and it still appears then the user, worst case, would lose a couple seconds tuning into that frequency and realizing no one was on the air anymore.

[Bockiii]

? You're using "pota.us" in the code and "pota.app" in your comment. Which is it?

[github-actions]

Pull request artifacts

file	last change
ParksOnTheAir-pr-context1	2022-04-01, 18:03:08

[s0lesurviv0r]

My apologies, I missed this. pota.us was what I used originally. This was working when I made this PR. Parks on the air has been under active development and during this time was migrated over to the pota.app domain. I updated the PR to reflect.

[Bockiii]

Ah, now it makes more sense.

Please fix all of the check-errors and then I think we can merge this

[s0lesurviv0r]

Sorry it took a little bit to figure out all these linting rules. I think we should be good now. Thanks for the help everyone!