Welcome to the AB5K web site.    Most of the information on the site is about Ham Radio.

I live on a 100 acre ranch near the town of Holland in central Texas. The station currently has 12 towers that range in heights up to 200 feet. Eight more towers are currently in process.

I develop software for a living. I have been working with Microsoft .NET/C# since 2000. I also develop software for ham radio.   One of my popular programs is a DX-Cluster application called AR-Cluster.   The first version of AR-Cluster was released back in 1998.  Hundreds of AR-Cluster applications are running around the world.

The key to selecting a cluster is performance.  With the addition of CW Skimmer spots and the Reverse Beacon Network the demands on the DX-Cluster system have increased by orders of magnitude.   Existing cluster software has demonstrated scalability issues and software authors have reduced features and/or imposed spot filters just so they can keep up.   The approach in AR-Cluster version 6 was to build a multi-threaded application from ground up that was optimized for the high spot volumes.   Users can get 100% of the raw spotting data or apply their own filters as needed.

Claims like "By far the fastest cluster package" with no supporting metrics are touted but what DXers and contesters really need to know is can the cluster application keep up with present day loads and scale to future spot volumes without imposed filtering?

 How fast is it?  You do the math, in AR-Cluster, performance metrics are calculated in real time and logged in the app log.   Here is a sample app log with execution timing, in seconds.   Ex: [0.00081]].

It's extremely fast.  AR-Cluster has been tested at spot rates of over one million spots per hour and a CPU utilization of less than 20 percent.   AR-Cluster was chosen as a key cluster technology to run on the Reverse Beacon Network.  Additionally, AR-Cluster has also been used as the spot aggregator at the K3LR contest station for several years.

On the user side, there is a brand new client application called AR-Cluster Client.    Click for AR-Cluster Client demo