Working a rare country in a big DX contest–or a rare state/province in a domestic contest-is often worth the extra effort because it’ll add to your multiplier count and substantially boost your final contest score. This month, let’s build an automatic mult bell that will ring every time you rack up a new multiplier, triggered by the network packets that modern contest loggers send after you log each QSO. Manually-operated “mult bells” are a long tradition at multi-operator stations to let each position brag to everyone else in the shack about the new country they just racked up–the automatic bell here carries the tradition into the networking age.
Like many advances in station automation in the past decades, the station’s ethernet network provides the backbone for accessory communication, and we’ll use it to ring our mult bell. Many loggers (both contesting and DXoriented) can send UDP packets on various topics for driving accessory hardware. In particular, the N1MM+ logger supports seven different kinds of UDP broadcasts that can be turned on and off. I’ve found that two particular packets–<RadioInfo> and <ContactInfo>–are especially useful for driving gadgets around the ham shack.
How far do your logger’s UDP messages go? The most common configuration is to broadcast UDP messages only onto your local network. If you have set up VPN for a geographically distributed station (as has