AE6RT Beacon

Beacon has been shut down due to lack of resources - thanks. AE6RT 11/29/2008

Introducing AE6RT Beacon beta

AE6RT Beacon is a networked desktop application written for the amateur radio community. It's free, open source, and turns every operator running it into a node in a worldwide distributed radio beacon network.

When an operator makes a QSO, she enters it into the Beacon application, which in turn publishes the QSO geographical information associated with both parties to all other operators running the program. Operators receiving these band open advertisements can then act on the information to attempt contacts to those parts of the world common to their QTH. Beacon therefore speaks to radio weather as much as it speaks to DX operating.

Beacon is a Java™ application, and therefore runs without modification or recompilation on Linux™, Mac OS X™, Solaris™ and Microsoft Windows™. It is written on top of JXTA™, Sun Microsystems's powerful open source peer to peer development and runtime platform.

Screenshots

A couple screenshots of Beacon in action.

A short user guide to Beacon

Here's a short user guide to using Beacon.

Run Beacon

After reading the short user guide above, download and run Beacon by clicking here.

Mailing list

Beacon discussion takes place here.

Frequently asked questions

A Beacon FAQ

Disclaimer

Beacon is a hobbyist application, written for pure amusement. It is not fit for any purpose. Please see the license for details.

Licensing and credits

Beacon is released under a BSD-like open source license. In the spirit of amateur information sharing, transparency, and elmering, here is the source code.

To do

A list of features and todo's.