Reverse Beacons, PSKReporter, etc

This month, there's a great article about sporadic E in the RSGB's periodical, RadCom.

I've tried to use the Reverse Beacon Network from time to time, as I have the alternative, PSK Reporter.  But I can't say I've found them very useful, and I have always quickly abandoned them.  Sure, a real-time map of where people's signals are going should be great.

But I think there's a problem for authors and researchers who start to rely on the databases generated by these 'skimming' services.  For one thing, the number of reporting stations is quite small and the geographic spread heavily biased, largely due to humanity's inability to distribute wealth equally.

So, when you don't see spots in some place and then conclude, as many do, that there was some fundamental physical reason for this happening, you run the considerable risk of being led up the garden path to a very wrong conclusion.  Even with WSPR, at the start of the Es season, and even at weekends, there is only one station across the whole eastern US running a 6m station.  And people draw conclusions from that?

This came to prominence when I looked at the discussion about noctilucent clouds potentially being involved in JA-Europe propagation.  Whilst NLC themeselves may not necessarily be the culprit, several other charged 'clouds' associated with them may well be.

However, the discussion in RadCom involved a central German station receiver, and a poor correlation with visual NLC was highlighted.  Unfortunately, whilst central Germany can sometimes see NLC, that location is generally too far south to see them as often as the latitudes, say, of 53-56 degrees north, where they are, from late May to early August, daily or near-daily occurrences.  So, conclusions based on what this station was receiving might be very different to what a RBN or PSK reporter receiver might report back if it were located at a higher latitude. 

This isn't to criticise the article or the author - it's a very thought-provoking piece of work.  But it might inform future analysis, or even promote a greater use of these skimming systems.  For my part, I'm sticking with WSPR, which is just much more user-friendly and intuitive, albeit with the same weakness of lacking adequate numbers of stations.