The detection shipped reading whatever the operator's cluster nodes happened to
carry. On VHF that is a few hundred skimmers, nearly all of them on HF: a 6 m
opening carrying 869 stations reached OpsLog as a handful of spots or none, and
Nexus flagged it on the same PC while OpsLog stayed silent.
internal/pskr subscribes to pskr/filter/v2/<band>/# on PSK Reporter's MQTT
broker. Every ordinary station running WSJT-X reports what it decodes, so the
difference is two orders of magnitude rather than a threshold. The feed's shape
suits us exactly: BOTH grids are in each message, so distance and bearing are
arithmetic — no lookup, and no DXCC-centre approximation, which is what made the
cluster path's bearings coarse. The geometry is injected from app.go so it stays
the same arithmetic the cluster path uses; two answers to one question is how a
bearing quietly becomes wrong.
Volume was the design constraint, not the protocol. Six metres open is thousands
of messages a minute and this runs on some very old PCs, so nothing is kept or
persisted in the watcher: each message is parsed, measured and handed on or
dropped, and the detector's existing window does the deciding.
And the part that was the real bug: enabling the watch now ARRANGES ITS OWN
SOURCES. It adds the two RBN nodes when missing and brings the feed up. A
feature that silently depends on sources nobody can know are needed does not
look unconfigured, it looks broken. Matched on host and port, not name, so an
operator who renamed theirs does not get a duplicate — which the detector would
read as twice as many stations, and announce an opening that is not there.
Turning it off leaves the nodes alone: they may have been wanted for their own
sake, and removing a node someone is using is worse than leaving one they are not.
IOTA is an official ADIF field, and almost everything for it was already here:
the qso table has carried my_iota since the first migration, the insert and scan
handle it, and both ADIF import and export write it. The one missing link was
the station profile, so the reference had to be typed on every contact of an
island activation, or added afterwards in a bulk edit.
Migration 0025 adds the column; it joins my_sota_ref and my_pota_ref in the
profile, in the Station Information panel, and in the same stamp-if-empty block
that fills the other My* fields on a logged QSO.
Uppercased and trimmed on save. ADIF spells it EU-005, and an operator typing
"eu-005" would otherwise put a reference no award matcher recognises on every
QSO of an activation - the kind of mistake you only find months later.
Backend groundwork; the columns and filters that consume it come next.
GRIDS. A CQ is the one WSJT-X message that carries a locator, and wsjtSender was
throwing that token away. It is now returned, validated as a real field+square,
and remembered per callsign. This is the ONLY grid source available: a DX-cluster
line carries the spotter's grid at best and never the DX's, and a per-callsign
QRZ lookup under an RBN firehose is not a trade worth making. So grids are known
for the stations this receiver decoded - which is exactly the FT8/FT4 watering
hole an operator is looking at while grid chasing.
RR73 is why the grid is validated rather than pattern-matched. R is inside A-R
and 73 inside 00-99, so a sign-off satisfies the Maidenhead shape exactly and
would have planted a grid that does not exist into the index, silently.
NEW GRID keys on "GRID|MODE" with the mode put through the same normMode as
everything else, so the "group digital modes" option decides whether a grid
worked on FT8 is still new on FT4 - one rule, no branch. Grids are truncated to
four characters: a log holds a mix of JN36 and JN36QU, and without that the same
square is new forever, once per subsquare.
On cost, which was the condition: one more DISTINCT scan when the status
snapshot is rebuilt, then map lookups per spot. The same shape as the county and
POTA sets it sits beside, and the snapshot exists precisely so a spot batch never
touches the logbook.
Spotter continent and the LoTW flag come from tables already in memory - the
DXCC prefix table and ARRL's user list - so they cost a lookup each. The spotter
continent answers a different question from the DX's: whether anyone near you is
hearing this at all.
Colour moves from the text to the CELL. A filled Band cell means new band, a
filled Pfx cell means new prefix, a filled County cell means new county. This is
not the pills coming back: a pill is a box inside the cell with its own height
and padding, so it pushed the text off the row baseline. A background has no
geometry - the text does not move a pixel - and it reads from across the room,
which a tinted glyph does not. Worked-call stays text-only: it is not a novelty,
and filling it would wash most of the rows.
The colours still come from the semantic tokens and lib/spotMarkers, so a fact
keeps one colour across the grid, the band map and the filter chips - and the
per-marker colour setting will drive all of it from one table.
US County column. The backend already resolved the county from the offline ULS
store to decide NewCounty and then threw it away; it now returns it, which costs
nothing.
The Locator column is renamed Spotter locator. It always held the SPOTTER's grid
- cluster.go says so - so a column labelled Locator next to a DX callsign was
reading as the DX's grid and was mostly empty besides. The DX grid is not in the
feed at any price worth paying under an RBN firehose.
Both display options move out of Preferences into the cluster filter panel,
beside Hide worked. They are changed while working a run, not set up once, and
a preferences dialog reopened every ten minutes is a filter in the wrong place.
Two options that change what the eye is pulled towards, both applying to the
cluster list AND the band map.
Mute worked before: a spot that brings nothing new loses its colour and its
badges. It stays in the list - the operator asked for less noise, not less
information. "Brings nothing new" reuses the dimming rule the cluster list
already had rather than inventing a second notion of done, so it keeps obeying
the same-slot option and the digital-mode grouping for free. A new-band or
new-slot status is NOT muted: having worked that callsign once on another band
says nothing about the band in front of you.
Highlight unworked in this slot: colours any callsign not yet worked on this
band and this mode, whatever the entity says. For an operator filling slots a
common entity on a fresh band+mode is the whole point, and the entity-level
status flatly calls it worked. It reuses the existing new-slot status, so no new
colour, no new legend, no new badge - both panels already knew how to draw it.
WorkedSlot is computed independently of the same-slot preference: it is what
this option reads, and it must not change meaning because a different option was
toggled. The slot index is now built when either option needs it, and the status
cache is keyed on both so a toggle invalidates it.
The rules live in one module used by both panels. Marker colours already taught
us what happens when the two derive the same thing separately.
Observation, not prediction, and it needs no new data source: the cluster event
worker already enriches every spot with the great-circle distance and bearing
from the operator's grid, which is exactly what a single-hop Es detection rests
on.
The signature is four or more DISTINCT stations at 500-2400 km inside a 90
degree bearing sector within twelve minutes. Each constraint earns its place:
distinct callsigns because one station spotted by six skimmers is six spots and
one station; the lower bound because a 6 m contact under 500 km is ordinary
tropo and says nothing about the ionosphere; the upper bound because past one
hop the bearing test stops meaning anything; and the sector because a real Es
cloud illuminates a direction, which is what separates an opening from a merely
busy evening.
Fed AFTER the Historical guard in the worker. A SH/DX reply replays a hundred
past spots in a second - precisely the shape of a burst - and would announce an
opening that ended hours ago.
Season LABELS, it never gates. Both hemispheres get a summer peak and a lesser
winter one, and an opening outside those is announced with "unusual for the
season" attached: the rare one is the one an operator must not hear about last.
One announcement per band per opening (45 minute quiet period). An opening runs
for hours and produces hundreds of spots; one alert is information, forty is
noise.
The band row was hardwired to 160-6 m, so an IC-9700 - the one radio in the range with no HF at all - showed ten dead buttons and none of 2 m, 70 cm or 23 cm. bandsFor(model) follows the model, exactly as attOptions already did for the attenuator steps. bandOfHz's labels had to move with it: it returned '70' where the button says '70cm', so the current-band highlight could never have matched, and it knew nothing of 23 cm.
The award editor offered five confirmation sources and Def's own doc comment
named five, but confirmed() had cases for three. "qrzcom" and "custom" fell
through the switch, so ticking either marked nothing as confirmed — the exact
failure the GrantCodes comment in this struct warns about: a checkbox that does
nothing is worse than no checkbox, because it is trusted.
QRZ.com reads qrzcom_qso_download_status, not the upload one: uploading a QSO
is us telling QRZ about it, which confirms nothing.
Custom names a field. Rather than a checkbox per external source, the Def gains
ConfirmField + ConfirmValue: any QSO field or ADIF extras key, and optionally
the comma-separated values that count. That one shape covers the three cases
asked for — the OpsLog card marker (APP_OPSLOG_QSL_RCVD), an arbitrary ADIF
tag, and a tag stamped by an imported club list — because all three end up as a
field on the QSO.
An empty ConfirmValue means any non-empty content confirms: the OpsLog marker
stores the date the card arrived, not a Y/N flag. A custom source naming NO
field confirms nothing, deliberately — the opposite default would silently mark
a whole logbook confirmed.
Typing RK3DWA found nothing while RK3DWA/3 found 21 QSOs, so a station's
history was only visible if you happened to type the exact form it had been
logged under — and an operator who worked it as /0, /P or /MM saw none of it.
The other RDA tools and Log4OM fold these together; this does too.
The predicate strips the suffix from what was typed and matches "call = base OR
call LIKE base/%", so it works from either end: the base call finds the portable
QSOs and a portable call finds the plain ones. Deliberately not a bare prefix
LIKE 'RK3DWA%', which would also match RK3DWAB — a different station. The '/' is
what makes it the same operator.
Settings -> General to turn it off. Default ON, hence the inverted storage: an
existing install has no key, and reading that as OFF would leave everyone with
the behaviour we were asked to change.
Contest dupe checking is untouched — it runs through ContestDupe, a separate
binding, and stays an exact match as a contest requires.
Settings -> DX Cluster: a toggle and an interval. When it is on, logging a QSO
announces the station on the master cluster — the QSO's own station callsign as
the DX, on the frequency the contact was made on — so callers find the run
without waiting for someone else to spot it. The node fills the DE field from
the login, so the spotter is us too: a self-spot.
It fires on the FIRST QSO of a frequency and then at most once per interval.
Both halves matter: announcing every QSO would flood the node and get the
station filtered out, while a pure timer would stay silent for minutes after a
band change. A drift of up to 500 Hz still counts as the same run, so nudging
the VFO mid-pileup does not re-announce.
Five minutes is the floor, clamped in SaveSelfSpotSettings as well as in the
input: the limit protects the node from us, so it must not depend on the
frontend. The interval input keeps raw text and clamps on blur — clamping per
keystroke rewrote "10" to "5" as soon as the "1" landed.
Wired into both log paths (manual entry and UDP auto-log) on the async side, so
a cluster that is slow or down never holds up logging. A send failure restores
the previous throttle state, so the next QSO retries instead of sitting out an
interval that produced no spot.
Stale since the 0.23.9 work: SetOpsLogQSLReceived, the backup keep_all
flag, the award PRIMARY search prefix and the default QSL message were
all missing from the generated bindings.
New BackupSettings.EveryExit (keyBackupEveryExit) with a Settings → Backup
checkbox. When on, the three shutdown-backup gates (plannedShutdownSteps,
runBackupForShutdown, maybeShutdownBackup) bypass the HasBackupToday /
HasADIFBackupToday "already done today" check and always run, so a second
session's QSOs are captured instead of skipped until the next day. The dated
backup file for today is refreshed (overwritten) each exit; prior days are still
kept by rotation.
New per-profile "tracked awards" selection: Settings → Awards (under User
configuration) is a two-column transfer list — every defined award on the left,
the ones you follow on the right, click to move either way. The Awards tab's
list is narrowed to the followed set; an empty set means "show them all" so the
tab is never blank.
Backend: app_awards_tracked.go adds keyAwardsTracked (per-profile JSON array of
award codes) with GetTrackedAwards/SaveTrackedAwards; saving emits
awards:tracked-changed so the Awards tab re-filters live. Award definitions stay
global — only the follow selection is per profile.
A contiguous FreqMin/FreqMax range can't drop a single band while keeping its
neighbours — so it couldn't express "40 m and 20 m yes, 30 m no" for an antenna
whose 30 m extension isn't fitted. Replace it with a Covered bands selector
(40 m–6 m) that applies to both the Ultrabeam and the SteppIR.
The follow loop and immediate re-tune now gate on band membership
(motorBandAllowed) instead of a MHz range: only bands in the operator's set are
followed, and 80 m/160 m are never followed (outside a beam's reach) regardless.
The legacy FreqMin/FreqMax is migrated to a band set on load and still
round-trips, so existing configs are unchanged. UI swaps the two number inputs
for a row of toggle chips.
Five operator-requested items:
- Alt+W clears the QSO entry. Handled before the `typing` guard and above
the keyer's key routing, so there is always one key that clears whatever
else is running — Esc is not that key when the CW keyer reserves it.
- The Grid box no longer pops outside the entry panel on a narrow window.
Row 2 needed 300+130+76+gaps = 538 px inside a panel whose min-width is
520, so Grid was pushed out and clipped at every narrow width, not just
extreme ones. QTH's min-width drops to 80 and the row wraps rather than
overflowing if it ever still can't fit.
- Selecting a QSO in the log now drives the Stats (F1) matrix. Uses its own
WorkedBefore call into separate state, NOT runWorkedBefore: that one owns
the entry form's wbRef and can trigger a field backfill, which browsing
the log must never do. The entry form wins whenever it holds a call.
- Clicking a coloured band/mode square lists the contacts behind it. Returns
the exact callsign AND the rest of the entity, because that pair is what
the cell's colour encodes; the call's own QSOs are bolded. The DXCC arm
matches the stored dxcc column only — reconstructing it from the callsign
here would disagree with the matrix above, which is built from that column.
- The Awards DXCC list shows each entity's primary prefix in its own sortable
column. Derived live from cty.dat into Ref.Group rather than stored on the
reference row, so an existing installation needs no re-seed.
The LoTW/QRZ confirmation download ran on the app-lifetime context, so it
kept going after the QSL Manager was closed and a new download didn't stop the
previous one. A slow QRZ sync therefore bled its "flag cleared" log into a
freshly started LoTW download — the operator saw QRZ activity during a LoTW
run. Now each download gets a cancellable context: starting one cancels the
previous, closing the window cancels it (CancelConfirmations), and the parse
loops bail promptly on cancel. (A LoTW http 503 is separate — ARRL's server.)
No single Kenwood mode digit fits every rig for a data mode: a K3/K4 wants
DATA (MD6), a TS-590SG/TS-990S data mode is a USB modifier set on the rig,
and MD6 on a plain Kenwood is FSK/RTTY. So the operator now chooses in
Settings → CAT: USB (default), DATA (MD6), or leave the rig's mode unchanged.
Only soundcard/data modes (FT8, PSK, JT…) follow this; RTTY/FSK stays its own
native mode, and voice/CW are untouched (isKenwoodDataMode + test).
- PGXL: remote AUTH password; direct-link meter fallback (VITA-first) with
250 ms poll + peak-hold; fan mode uses bare "fanmode=" (was ignored).
- TCI: spot colour sent as decimal ARGB (ExpertSDR dropped the hex string);
spot click handled via CLICKED_ON_SPOT / RX_CLICKED_ON_SPOT to fill the entry.
- FlexRadio: clicking an OpsLog spot on the panadapter now applies the mode too.
- Filter presets: the trash icon deletes again (Radix pointer-down intercept).
- PTT hotkey: keys over CAT when a backend is active (was hijacked by a stale
Audio-tab RTS/DTR serial setting); AltGr keys allowed; presses logged.
- CW macro <LOGQSO>: logs after the preceding CW is sent, not on the first letter.
Settings -> Rotator is now a list like the amplifiers: add/remove rotors,
mix PstRotator / Rotator Genius / ARCO, and a Rotator Genius can drive both
its ports (one entry = two rotors). The compass gains a rotor selector, and
a per-rotor motorized-antenna flag so the boom/pattern paths show only for
the rotor carrying the Ultrabeam/SteppIR.
Also in this batch: a keyboard PTT hotkey (hold-to-talk or toggle, reusing
the audio PTT method with a CAT fallback), and TCI spot push to the
panadapter with click-to-fill of the callsign.
The 0.22.7/0.22.8 breakage came from a Xiegu-reported fault being fixed
inside the Yaesu and Kenwood backends. The lesson is structural: nothing
a backend does may be steered by another backend's report or another
backend's setting.
The lower-lines checkbox introduced for 0.22.9 was still one shared key
applied to both Yaesu and Kenwood — the same reflex in miniature. It is
now cat.yaesu.low_dtr_rts and cat.kenwood.low_dtr_rts, each checkbox in
its backend's own settings block, each wired only to its backend. The
shared key never shipped, so nothing needs migrating.
Both defaults break someone. 0.22.7 lowered the lines on Yaesu and
Kenwood and silenced a TS-990 whose interface needs RTS raised to
transmit; 0.22.8 stopped lowering them and an FT8 station reported its
output power wandering, cured by closing OpsLog — Windows raises both on
open and the interface reads one as PTT.
So it is now a checkbox on those two backends, off by default: that is
how they behaved before any of this. Xiegu keeps lowering them
unconditionally (its own report, its own explicit keying setting), and
the CI-V backend keeps the behaviour it has always had.
Selecting CW showed FT8 and SSB contacts. The filter ran client-side over
the reference list and nothing else, so a reference kept because it had
one CW contact still displayed the band cells it earned on SSB, still
counted its SSB confirmations, and opening it listed every contact
regardless of mode.
The class now narrows the log BEFORE the engine runs, so the bands, the
totals and the confirmations all describe the selected mode, and
AwardCellQSOs takes the same class. The panel cache is keyed by
"CODE|MODECLASS" — one key per award showed the previous mode's numbers
after switching.
The snapshot is cached by log revision, so this costs a matching pass and
no database read.
The cluster already answers this question for a spot; the entry panel did
not answer it for the station actually being worked. A county hunter
needs to know before the QSO ends — by the time the county shows up in
the awards table the station is long gone.
qso.CountyWorked asks about one county instead of loading the whole
worked set, narrowed to the state so it stays a few dozen rows on a
remote MySQL. It compares through award.USCountyKey on both sides rather
than in SQL, because logged spellings vary ("Los Angeles" against
"LOS ANGELES, CA") and that key function is what resolves it everywhere
else.
An empty or non-US county is not "new" but unknown, and shows nothing: a
badge on a guess is worse than no badge.
The refusal to guess was only visible in the award editor's test tab and
in the awards table — both of them places an operator goes long after the
contact is over. It has to appear while the station is still in front of
you, so ComputeQSOAwardRefs now reports the candidates it declined to
assign and the F3 panel lists them as buttons: click one and it is
written to award_refs, replacing any sibling picked for that award.
They are never auto-added — adding one would be exactly the guess the
setting exists to refuse.
Also: the dark-theme fix for the native calendar glyph named only
input[type=date], so date-time fields kept an invisible icon. All the
temporal input types now share the rule.
Two DARC DOKs are both called "Gießen" — two clubs share the town. Exact
matching finds both and both are right as far as the matcher can tell, so
it kept both and the operator got a QSO credited to a DOK that may well
have been the other one.
Picking one is not an option: it writes a reference into the log with no
evidence behind it. So a Def can now be marked one reference per QSO, and
an ambiguous match on such an award assigns none, names the candidates in
the trace and leaves the contact under missing references — where the
operator's choice now sticks (06e3437).
Off by default, and deliberately NOT a revival of the old `Multi` flag: a
field holding several references (an n-fer POTA activation, a VUCC grid
line) is several references, correctly, and stays that way.
Reported on the DARC DOK award, with DL2FDM: a German address matches two or
three DOKs, the operator deletes the wrong ones and assigns the right one, and
the next recompute puts the wrong ones straight back.
The manual reference was APPENDED to what the matcher found. Storage already
kept exactly one manual entry per award — setOverrideRef drops the previous one
— so it was an override everywhere except at the one place it mattered. The
operator was arguing with the matcher and could not win.
It now replaces. The trace records what was superseded, so a corrected QSO can
still be explained rather than being merely different. A QSO with no correction
keeps every automatic reference, which the test also pins: an override must not
quietly disable matching for everyone else.
This does not address the over-matching itself — an address containing "Berlin
Mitte, 10115 Berlin" genuinely matches two DOK descriptions. That is the next
question, and a separate one.
Reported on a Xiegu G90. With the blue programming cable — three wires, no
modem lines — CAT works perfectly. Behind a DE-19, which carries audio, CAT and
PTT, the radio went into transmit the moment OpsLog connected and stayed there.
Windows raises DTR and RTS when a serial port is opened, and the DE-19 reads
them as PTT; Xiegu's own documentation asks for both low. The CI-V backend has
dropped them since it was written, for the same reason on Icom rigs with USB
SEND mapped to a line. Xiegu, Yaesu and Kenwood did not. They do now.
The second half of the report: WSJT-X through OpsLog's rigctld decoded fine and
never transmitted. Nothing was broken in that chain — set_ptt reaches the
backend, which sends the CI-V PTT command, which a G90 ignores. That is why
Xiegu keys on a hardware line instead. The backend can now do that: Settings →
CAT → Xiegu → how the rig is keyed (CI-V / RTS / DTR).
Untested here — no G90 in reach. The operator who reported it offered to try.
A panadapter shot settles it: answering an S5 station, the replayed recording
goes out several times wider and taller than the station being answered — in WAV
as well as MP3, so this is not the encoder.
One setting served two sources that have nothing in common. A voice-keyer
message is a microphone at speaking distance and legitimately wants 195%; a QSO
recording is a receiver's line output, which is far hotter. The same 195% put it
into the transmitter flat out, ALC pinned, noise and voice alike.
The QSO playback now has its own level, defaulting to 100%. The voice keyer
keeps the setting it had, so nobody's F-key messages change.
Reported again after the monitor was wired up: 300% still sounded like 10%. The
monitor fix was right but could not show, because the sliders only changed the
settings panel's own state — the value reached the audio engine when the
operator clicked Save.
A level is set by ear, by dragging. It now applies on every move, to the monitor
and to the recorder mix alike; saving still persists it. Both halves were needed
and neither works alone.
All / CW / Phone / Digital, stacked on top of the worked/confirmed filter. The
question an operator actually has — which DXCC entities have I worked on CW but
not confirmed on CW — needs both at once; answering only one of them is what
sends people to a spreadsheet.
References carried bands but not modes, so the award computation now aggregates
mode CLASSES per reference, worked and confirmed separately. Classes, not ADIF
modes: nobody chasing CW cares whether the digital side was FT8 or RTTY, and a
list of twenty mode names would not answer the question. An unrecognised mode
counts as data rather than as nothing, so a new digital mode does not vanish
from the filter the day it appears.
Two rules the filter needs to be honest:
- Not-confirmed means not confirmed ON THIS MODE. An entity worked on CW and
confirmed on SSB is still a CW entity to chase, and that is exactly what the
filter is for.
- "Not worked" plus a mode is a contradiction — an unworked reference has no
mode — so the mode filter stands aside there instead of emptying the list.
Settings → FlexRadio, beside the per-band antennas and applied the same way:
when the band or the mode changes. 1.5 kW that is fine on SSB has no business
going into an FT8 signal on the same band.
Three classes rather than one row per mode, because what decides the power is
duty cycle and what the amplifier will take of it, not the mode's name — FT8 and
RTTY punish an amplifier the same way, SSB and AM do not. The classification is
pinned by a test: a digital mode sorted as phone would deliver exactly the
1.5 kW this exists to prevent.
An empty box means "leave the power alone", never zero watts, and an unknown
mode changes nothing — setting a transmit power from a name we do not recognise
is not a good guess.
Unlike the antennas, a locked band does not skip it: the lock means "do not let
the rig drag my log entry around", not "let the amplifier keep whatever the last
mode left".
Opt-in, off by default: neither service can undo it, and a local delete is not
always a statement about the world — a duplicate cleared out of a contest log
was never meant to change the DX's log.
The two APIs are not alike, and the difference decides what is possible:
- Club Log deletes by MATCH (callsign, exact timestamp, band number), so it
works for every QSO in the log, past or future. The band table is its own
list and is pinned by a test: a band mapped to the wrong number does not
fail, it points the delete at a different QSO.
- QRZ.com deletes ONLY by logid. So markExtUploaded now stores the LOGID it
already received on every upload — it was being logged and thrown away. A
QSO uploaded before this cannot be withdrawn from here at all, and the log
says so by name rather than leaving the operator to assume it worked.
Both run BEFORE the local delete, because both need the QSO's own fields to
find their copy and there is nothing left to ask with once the row is gone.
Neither can block it: the operator asked for the QSO to go, and a refusing
website is not a reason to keep it.
The situation, in the operator's words: working VP2MAA, recording, and he asks
to hear his own signal. So: stop, play, and the recording is still saved with
the QSO.
Stopping FREEZES the take rather than ending it — nothing more is captured,
nothing is discarded, and logging writes the file exactly as before. Playback
reuses the voice keyer's path: same output device, same PTT keying and release
with its generation guard, so a replay cannot be cut short by a stale unkey.
Playing is refused while still recording. The transmitted audio would feed back
into the same take on any rig monitoring its own transmission, and stopping is
one click the operator has already made — it is their statement that the take is
finished, not a hoop.
The elapsed clock freezes with the recording and resumes from where it stopped,
because it now shows the LENGTH OF THE FILE rather than the time since the QSO
began. Only a fresh take returns it to zero.
A red dot in the slot the counter will occupy. Click it and the counter starts,
the dot disappears, and logging the QSO writes the file exactly as an automatic
recording would — the save path already keyed off an active take, not off the
setting.
With automatic recording disabled the capture engine is not idle, it is not
running at all, so a manual take starts it. Two consequences handled here:
- It is released again when the take ends — logged, cancelled, or dropped for
being a digital mode. An operator who records one contact does not expect
their microphone held open for the rest of the session. The release is a
deferred call at the top of the save path so every exit goes through it,
rather than one that has to be remembered at each return.
- There is no pre-roll. An automatic recording opens with the seconds BEFORE
the callsign was typed; a manual one can only begin now. The button's
tooltip says so, because otherwise the difference between two files is a
mystery to the person holding them.
The button only appears where it can work: devices configured, automatic
recording off, and a mode whose audio is worth keeping. That state is asked of
the backend rather than inferred from a preference in the interface, so the two
cannot drift apart, and it is re-read when settings are saved.
The same ASCII stream over a socket instead of a wire: ser2net, an
Ethernet-serial adapter, a Raspberry Pi at the radio. One TCP transport
presented as a serial port, so the backend keeps a single code path.
Explicitly NOT the radio's own RJ45. A TS-890 or TS-990 speaks Kenwood's
KNS/ARCP there — session, authentication, a different protocol — and that needs
one of those radios in hand to write honestly. The setting's help text says so,
because an operator who plugs in their TS-890's Ethernet port and types its
address deserves to learn that from the interface rather than from silence.
Two details that decide whether this is usable or maddening:
- A read deadline expiring is reported as "no data yet", not as an error. It
is exactly what a serial read timeout means to the caller; as an error it
would make ask() abandon a rig that is merely thinking.
- The log line names what was connected to. "connected on @ 0 baud" after a
network connect sends someone hunting a serial fault that does not exist.
The host wins over the COM port when both are filled: it is the more deliberate
setting, and silently preferring the wire leaves someone staring at an address
they typed and a radio that never answers.
Grey line — the day/night terminator and its twilight band, off by default,
redrawn every minute so a map left open all day is not silently wrong by
evening. Its own Leaflet pane below the overlays, non-interactive, so it never
hides the path or beam nor swallows a click.
The solar maths is pure and was checked against known positions before being
wired to anything: both solstices, the March equinox, the subsolar longitude at
12 UTC, and day/night at Paris, Tokyo, New York, Sydney and Reykjavik across
seasons and hemispheres. That last set is what caught the real bug: the equation
has TWO solutions per meridian and the naive branch put New York in daylight at
02:00 in December — the terminator at +63° where it belongs at −63°. A shaded
map that looks entirely plausible and is exactly mirrored. It now anchors on the
classical terminator and takes the branch nearest it, which is also what makes
the twilight band follow the terminator instead of jumping hemisphere.
Separately, from a Xiegu user: the protocol-trace checkbox does not stay ticked.
It is React state initialised to false on every mount, so a trace still running
came back unticked — the operator ticks it to "switch it on", which switches it
OFF, and the log they send contains no trace at all. Worse than a cosmetic bug:
it silently defeats the one tool asked for to diagnose their radio. Both boxes
(CAT and WinKeyer) now read their real state from the backend.
An operator worked the RSGB IOTA contest in another logger and got back records
carrying <STATE:5>EU005: N1MM-class software stores the received exchange in the
column its contest module uses, not the one ADIF reserves. Imported verbatim,
every QSO gains a US-state field reading "EU005" and the IOTA award sees
nothing — the reference is in the log, just not where anything looks for it.
The import dialog gains optional source → destination rows, prefilled with
STATE → IOTA since that is the case that prompted it. Applied to the RAW record
before conversion, so it works for promoted columns and Extras alike and the
destination is parsed exactly as if the file had carried it there.
Two rules, both from the same principle that the file outranks our guess:
- the source is CLEARED, so a reference does not linger in STATE where it
would show as the contacted station's US state in the grid and every export;
- a destination the file already filled is kept, judged against the record as
it ARRIVED — otherwise the result would depend on Go's map iteration order,
which is deliberately random.
The swap case in the test is what forced that second rule to be stated: "never
overwrite" and "exchange two fields" cannot both hold silently, so a destination
that is itself a mapping source is treated as an explicit swap and nothing else
is overwritten.
Two white-screen reports are open — one after logging a 10 GHz QSO, one on
starting a DVK auto-call — and neither could be investigated, for the same
reason: a render error emptied the window and left NOTHING. No line in
opslog.log, no dialog, nothing the operator could send but the words "white
screen". A fault the user cannot report is a fault that cannot be fixed.
So before hunting either trigger, the reporting path:
- An error boundary catches a render throw, writes the error and component
stack to the app log through the new LogUIError binding, and shows it on
screen — selectable, with Copy and Reload.
- Global handlers catch what a boundary cannot: throws from timers, event
handlers and rejected promises. An auto-call loop lives entirely in
callbacks, which is exactly where the second report came from, and those
leave no trace at all today.
It deliberately does not try to resume: React cannot promise sane state after a
render throw, and a half-working logger would be worse than a clear stop.
This does not fix either crash. It makes the next occurrence arrive with its
cause attached, which is the step that has been missing.
Reported on an IC-9100: the MOX button does not transmit, it sets split. The
source sends the PTT command (0x1C 0x00) and nowhere sends the split one (0x0F),
so the discrepancy is between what OpsLog sends and what the rig acts on — and
that link has already been shown, in the same operator's log, to lose frame sync.
Rather than guess from the command table, this adds what settled the WinKeyer
bug in one line: the actual bytes. Settings → CAT → Log the CI-V protocol writes
every frame in both directions as hex. RX is traced BEFORE framing, since the
bytes as they arrived are what reveals a lost boundary — a decoded view would
hide exactly the fault being hunted.
Session-only, like the keyer trace: it is a diagnostic, and a log full of hex
helps nobody who forgot it was on.
I am not claiming a cause yet. The last time I inferred one from a protocol
document rather than from evidence, I inverted a digit and broke the case that
worked.
A sixth CAT backend, talking to a TS-590/890/990/2000 over its serial port with
no OmniRig in between — frequency, mode, VFO, split and PTT. Elecraft K3/K4 and
the "Kenwood" setting on other radios speak the same dialect.
The protocol was not researched from scratch: internal/catemu already ANSWERS
these commands, pretending to be a TS-2000 so an ACOM amplifier follows OpsLog.
The IF frame layout here is read from the same format string catemu emits, so
the two halves of the repository agree by construction — and the test caught my
own fixture being one character short, which is exactly the error that layout
invites.
Design notes worth keeping:
- IF; is the poll. One frame carries frequency, TX state, mode, VFO and split,
so simplex operation costs a single round trip; the other VFO is only asked
for when split is actually on.
- FA/FB take ELEVEN digits here where Yaesu uses nine. That is the likeliest
place to copy the Yaesu backend and be wrong by a factor of a hundred, so it
has its own test.
- Every lesson the Yaesu backend learned the hard way is built in from the
start: replies matched to the command that asked, "?;" remembered so a poll
stops paying a timeout for an unsupported command, the serial handle closed
before reopening, and a rig that answers nothing reported as absent rather
than "connected".
Untested on hardware — I have no Kenwood here. The frame parsing is covered by
tests against catemu's own format.
An ERC (Easy Rotor Control, incl. ERC Mini) emulates Yaesu GS-232A/B, which is
exactly what the backend written for the microHAM ARCO already speaks — azimuth
out (Maaa), azimuth in (C), stop (S), which is the whole of what was asked for.
So this is two small gaps rather than a new backend:
- Serial speed was hardcoded to 9600. An ARCO's virtual COM ignores it, but an
ERC runs at whatever its own configuration sets, and a mismatch reads as a
dead rotator. It is now selectable beside the COM port.
- The entry was called "microHAM ARCO", so an ERC owner would never have found
it. It is named after the PROTOCOL now: "GS-232A controller (microHAM ARCO,
ERC…)".
The help text states the condition plainly in both languages, because it is the
one thing that will otherwise waste an evening: an ERC left on Hy-Gain DCU-1
speaks a different command set and simply will not answer.
Untested on hardware — I have no ERC here, and the GS-232 path itself is proven
on a real ARCO.
The messages went to the radio exactly as recorded. Nothing in OpsLog could
raise them, so a microphone captured quietly drove the rig quietly and the only
remedies were the radio's own USB input menu or the Windows mixer — which is
where the operator was heading. There is now a level from 10 to 400 %, applied
with clamping (a wrap would turn loud speech into noise on the air), and Play
previews at that same level so the adjustment is made against what will actually
be transmitted.
The PTT method list also named only OmniRig, Flex, Icom and TCI, so choosing a
native Yaesu left "CAT" with no backend beside it — which reads as "there is no
CAT PTT for my radio" and sends the operator to RTS on a COM port that has
nothing to do with the rig. Same list-needing-every-member shape as three
earlier bugs in this feature. The TestPTT log line had the same rot: it said
"CAT via OmniRig" whatever backend was running.
An FM carrier could not answer it: constant by definition, so nothing to
correlate. CW at 100 W did, because the keying itself varies the output:
key down: RM4=25 RM5=207 RM6=13
key up: RM4=25 RM5=0 RM6=0
RM5 follows the RF envelope exactly — it IS the power meter. RM4 sits near 25
whether the key is down or up, so it is not measuring output at all, and reading
it as power is what showed 8 W on a 100 W transmission. The operator's hunch was
right and my first reading of the ramp was wrong: what I took for a needle
rising was RM4 drifting, not tracking.
Watts are now derived from that meter (207 = 100 W, measured) instead of the
power SETTING scaled by a percentage — the setting says what was asked for, the
meter says what left the radio.
The bars also hold their peak with a gentle decay. In CW the meters genuinely
read zero between elements, so following the raw value made them flash to nothing
several times a second; a needle has inertia, and this only ever holds a value
the radio really reported.
A second measurement at a known mismatch settled both the index and the scale.
At SWR 1.1: RM6=0. At SWR 1.5: RM6=52, while RM4 kept tracking the power.
52/255 = 0.204, which is the reflection coefficient of a 1.5 SWR to three
decimals. So the raw value is rho scaled to 255, and the ratio is
(1+rho)/(1-rho) — physics, not a curve fitted through two points, which is why
2.0 and 3.0 fall out of it correctly without ever having been measured.
The panel now shows that ratio, the number the operator reads on the rig, rather
than a percentage of meter travel — and a dash while receiving, since a stale SWR
from the last transmission reads as a live one.
Both measurements are recorded in the code and in a test, so the mapping is
evidence rather than a table borrowed from another model — which is exactly how
it came to read 81 in the first place.
The radio has a keyer and a command to feed it (KY), so an FTDX10 needs no
WinKeyer and no second cable, exactly as the Icom CI-V and Flex CWX engines
already do. The rig keys with its own timing, which is why the spacing is right
where a PC keying a line through USB latency drifts.
Text is filtered to what the keyer can actually send: an unsupported byte does
not produce an error on a Yaesu, it can abort the whole buffer, so the rest of a
macro would vanish silently. It is then fed in 24-character pieces, waiting for
room between them — the rig DROPS what does not fit, again with no error, so a
contest CQ would lose its tail.
STOP is the honest gap. Yaesu documents no buffer-clear, so it drops the
transmitter (TX0) instead: nothing queued reaches the air, which is what Escape
means to an operator. It deliberately does NOT send "KY0;" — a plausible-looking
clear that the rig would read as the CHARACTER zero and transmit.
A test caught a real one on the way: tabs and newlines were dropped as
"unsupported", gluing the words either side together, so a macro written on two
lines went out as CQCQ. Whitespace now becomes a word gap before filtering.
Settings warn when the Yaesu keyer is selected without the Yaesu CAT backend —
otherwise it simply never keys, with nothing on screen saying why.
Send path follows the CAT reference and how Hamlib drives these rigs; NOT yet
verified on the air.
Microphone gain and VOX are meaningless in CW: the rig ignores both, so showing
them is showing dead controls. They are hidden, and a CW card takes their place
with keyer speed (KS), break-in (BI) and ZIN (ZI), the zero-in that retunes so
the station being received lands on the operator's own pitch.
ZIN is a one-shot with no state, so it is a plain button rather than a chip that
would look latched, and no settings read-back follows — the frequency change
arrives through the normal poll like any other.
The keyer values are read on the slow beat whatever the mode, so the card is
already populated the instant the operator switches to CW instead of filling in a
poll cycle later.
Which controls show is decided by the RIG's mode, not the logged one: the logged
mode can be a digital sub-mode the radio knows nothing about.
rouggy