Briefly, how does Beacon work?
All computers running Beacon are called peers. When an operator running Beacon makes a contact that he/she wishes to make known to the rest of the Beacon user community, the basic contact information is entered into the Beacon user interface and published to the Beacon network. The contact information in Beacon parlance is called an advertisement. Other Beacon users can query the network for these advertisements, and in turn learn about the contact and therefore learn that propagation conditions supported the contact. Those other users can then attempt to contact that part of the world, too, if their QTH matches one of the QTH’s in the advertisement. Beacon conducts its JXTA network business on TCP port 9701. Java Web Start network business occurs on port 80, as it is http-based.
