Meet the Team at Pacificon
ORI is proud to support PSKReporter as a fiscal sponsor. It is an honor and a privilege to assist the project as the team takes some substantial steps forward.
If you’ve ever fired up WSJT-X, made a contact, and then watched your signal reports appear across a world map, then you have used PSKReporter. It is durable and lasting infrastructure that the entire amateur radio community depends upon every single day. Radio software at all ends of the Earth send reception reports to pskreporter.info. The service stores, aggregates, and maps them for everyone. There are nearly 70 billion reception reports in the core database, and this number grows continuously.
Created and maintained by Philip Gladstone, N1DQ, PSKReporter has been faithfully doing its job for years on a foundation of Perl, Redis, MySQL, and a lot of care and love. And here’s some very exciting news. PSKReporter is getting a major infrastructure “glow-up”, and it’s happening in an Open Source way. Collaboratively, intelligently, incrementally, and with the service remaining up the entire time.
What’s Happening
A volunteer team of Philip, Vijay, and Joni has mapped out a three-phase modernization plan. Implementation has begun.
Phase 1 moves the existing, battle-tested code into containers on new hardware. This is a careful “lift and shift”. Nothing about the service changes in terms of behavior, but this move does make it dramatically easier to deploy, back up, and deal with. Configuration gets cleaned up, security gets hardened, and for the first time there will be a full-fledged development environment running in parallel with production. That last part is a big deal. This means more people can safely contribute to a service that previously lived on one machine.
Phase 2 adds operational maturity. Automated backups, deeper security hardening, performance tuning, and real observability with dashboards and metrics.
Phase 3 looks further ahead. There will be a modern map-based frontend, a purpose-built time-series database for those hundreds of millions of reports, and other upgrades, each swapped in one at a time without breaking the service.
What makes this effort a great story for the open source amateur radio community isn’t just the technology. It is the process. The plan explicitly protects the maintainer’s existing workflow, keeps the live service undisturbed, and brings new collaborators in through a branch-and-review structure where every change is small, documented, and reviewed. It’s a model for how a beloved single-maintainer single-machine project can grow a container-based contributor community without drama and without downtime. This is exactly the kind of sustainable, generous engineering we love to celebrate at ORI.
The PSKReporter team is looking for more volunteers with expertise in software development and maintenance to join them to help stabilize support and increase velocity so we can get to a modern version of PSKReporter sooner. They are also supported financially by NCDXF, which gives them some room to focus on execution.
See the PSKReporter Team at Pacificon 2026
the PSKReporter team will be at Pacificon 2026, and they’re giving a talk!
Pacificon, the ARRL Pacific Division convention hosted by the Mt. Diablo Amateur Radio Club, runs Friday, October 16 through Sunday, October 18, 2026, at the San Ramon Marriott in San Ramon, California. If you’ve ever wanted to hear how a high-volume, real-time reception reporting service actually works under the hood, or where it’s headed next, then this is your chance to hear it straight from the people building it. Watch the Pacificon forum schedule for the day and time, find the room, and bring your questions.
And if you’re one of the thousands of hams whose reports flow through PSKReporter every day, consider stopping by just to say thank you. Infrastructure this good deserves a full room.
Congratulations to Philip, Vijay, and the whole team. We can’t wait to see what comes next!