This web site delivers data in a small number of ways. This web page describes and demonstrates some of those ways.

Graphs ("plots") are used to show the level of activity between FT8 senders and receivers, and the distance between those receivers, as they vary throughout a day. The x-axis shows the time during the day. The UTC (aka GMT) time zone is used unless otherwise indicatd, but the letter "Z" is used to improve readability, e.g. "04:00Z" for 4:00AM, GMT.

These concepts and terms are used throughout this web site:

• Maidenhead Field: the largest subdivision of the Maidenhead Locator System, e.g. "JN"
• Time Quanta: each day is broken up into 5-minute intervals, and two simple measurements are calculated for each of those intervals
• Spot Count: the number of reports received from FT8 monitors, during a time period. This might be a global count, or the count of transmissions from a specifc Maidenhead field. Note that these are counts of receptions, not transmissions.
• Average Distance: this is the average distance between sender and receiver, during that time period. This is either calculated over a specific pair of sender-and-receiver field, or, for such a pair of fields, the average distance including those pairs that are separated by more than 1,000 km. This is called the Average DX Distance.
• Box-and-Whisker Plot: this is one way to visually show important parts of an entire a set of data. These indicate the range of most common values, as well as the extreme values. For example, most plots show the current day's spot count, and also show the distribution of spot counts for the previous 3 weeks, so you can compare that specific day against the recent past.

Here is an example of a spot count plot. It shows the number of spots that were reported during each five-minute period of a specific day, on the 6m band, including all reports from around the world. This plot helps us understand the level of activity on that band.

Several factors drive the level of activity:

• Whether there are active hams in a location with decent ionospheric propagation characteristics, which depends on several factors.
• Human behavior; for example an opening might be reported to other operators, who then drop what they're doing so they can try to make new contacts, and incidentally drive up the spot count.

We can repeat the above plot, but also add little box-and-whisker plots, one per 5-minute period. Together they show us whether this particular day's activity level is normal, at a global scale, but at many times during the day.

We see that there were many more reports than normal, from 07:00 to 09:00 UTC.

The previous box plots omitted "outliers" - the number of spots on a recent day where the count was extremely different from the other previous days. This next plot includes the outliers. They may have been from one recent day, when there was an opening.

The global plots above give us a very big-picture view, but don't help us see activity in different regions of the world. We can zoom in to a per-field view, as shown below. As before, the blue line shows the spot count, and we also add a green line for the subset of spots where the sender and receiver were separated by more than 1,000 km.

We see that the vast majority of spots are for distances under 1,000 km.

Speaking of distance, we can view the average distance between sender and receiver, and the average distance excluding distances less than 1,000 km. Note that the y-axis no longer shows spot count, but the distance between sender and receiver.

Note the brief spike at 17:00 UTC.

Finally, we can add box plots for recent days in order to look for unusual activity. Note that many recent days had a spike at 17:00 UTC. Why?