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ibp

Shows which NCDXF/IARU beacon is transmitting right now, on which band

What it does

The NCDXF/IARU International Beacon Project runs eighteen beacons around the world, transmitting in a fixed three-minute rotation on five bands -- 14.100, 18.110, 21.150, 24.930 and 28.200 MHz. This computes the schedule from the clock and tells you which beacon is on which band at this instant, in a terminal, updating as it moves. It will also send the active beacon's callsign as Morse.

Why you would want it

It turns the beacons into a propagation instrument rather than a curiosity. Tune to 14.100, watch which callsigns you can hear as the rotation goes round, and you have measured the band's reach in three minutes -- from known transmitters, at known powers, in known places. That is a real measurement, and nothing on the internet substitutes for it because it is your antenna and your receiver that are being tested.

Before it will work

An accurate clock. The whole thing is a schedule computation, so a clock a minute out tells you confidently about the wrong beacon. Run NTP or chrony. A receiver on the five frequencies above, and preferably CW ears -- the beacons send their callsign then four dashes at descending power.

How it installs

  • source (make) from http://www.pa3fwm.nl/software/ibp/ibp-0.21.tgz
  • build dependencies: build-essential, libncurses-dev
  • the project's build system has no install rule; the binaries listed below are copied into the prefix instead
  • AHRL's verdict was wrong for this target, and not by a little. Its "many, many compiler errors" is one missing header: ibp.c:14:10: fatal error: curses.h: No such file or directory. With libncurses-dev installed, make exits 0 with no compiler flags at all and produces a binary that runs -- ./ibp -h prints its usage. Tested in a Debian 13 container on 2026-08-28, and re-tested with the permissive flags this catalog carries elsewhere, which changed nothing, so none are carried. The Makefile defaults to CFLAGS = -DnoX11, so this is the curses build. An Imakefile for an X11 version ships alongside it and is not used here.

Binaries this produces:

  • ibp

Known problems

A wrong system clock produces confident nonsense with no indication that anything is amiss, which is the failure worth knowing about. Beacons do go off the air individually and the program cannot know that -- hearing nothing from one slot is not evidence about propagation until you have checked the NCDXF status page. This is the curses build; there is no graphical interface.

Keeping it current

  • probe: none
  • strategy: rebuild
  • 0.21 is the current and probably final release; the man page is dated 2003. Finished software rather than abandoned -- the beacon schedule it implements has not changed since 1995, and if it does, that is the thing to watch for rather than a release.

Where to get help with the software itself

Pieter-Tjerk de Boer, PA3FWM. GPL-2.0, read from the COPYING file in the tarball. The page above is the only contact route; there is no tracker. The sha256 is ours, computed from that download -- upstream publishes no checksum -- so it pins the bytes reviewed and built and implies no signature.

Source: catalog/packages/ibp.yaml