Three corrections from the first real session. Routed via a manager, the box
was prefilled with the DX's own address — the one thing that must not go on
that envelope. It now starts empty and the QRZ fetch fills in the MANAGER's;
switching the routing recomputes the box unless the operator has typed in it,
because a hand-checked address is not the app's to replace.
A fetch that came back with no street was overwriting a reviewed address with a
bare country — the cty.dat fallback dressed as an answer. It now refuses to
touch the box and says nothing was found. And the prefill no longer stacks the
same town three times (address + QTH + country all carrying it).
The output is ONE PDF for the whole session, each page at its own label size,
written to the temp dir and opened straight in the viewer — no save dialog: the
file is a print run, not a document to keep.
The printing session in three steps. The worklist is the paper queue (ADIF
qsl_sent R/Q), grouped by callsign since several QSOs of one station share a
card. Each recipient is reviewed before anything prints: routing first — via
manager when qsl_via says so, direct when an address is known, bureau otherwise
— then the address itself, editable and fetchable from QRZ (the MANAGER's
address when routing says via). What is printed is the reviewed text verbatim,
not a re-resolution that could differ from what was checked.
One PDF per label kind, never one file for all: a roll printer holds one stock
at a time, and a file mixing 29 mm addresses with 62 mm QSO labels could not be
printed at all. Pages are rasterised by the designer's own renderer at the
stock's dpi and carried into the PDF untouched — internal/pdf is a hand-written
image-page writer (DeviceGray + flate: monochrome, lossless, no cgo) because
that is the entire need.
Bureau stations get no address label (no envelope); return labels are printed
one per envelope. Finishing offers the log update: QSL_SENT=Y, the chosen date,
via B or D per routing — through the same BulkUpdateQSL the paper view uses.
The designer's data model lives in internal/labels: STOCKS are the physical
roll in the printer (geometry in mm, margins, dpi — seeded with the common
Brother DK sizes, the QL family being what prompted the feature), TEMPLATES are
one design each, of two kinds: the QSO label glued on the card, whose repeating
table carries several contacts of the same station, and the address label for
the envelope, whose lines collapse when a variable is empty.
Everything is measured in millimetres — labels are sold in mm, and an operator
lining a design up against a physical sticker thinks in mm; pixels exist only in
the renderer, at the stock's dpi. The canvas renderer is shared between the
editor's preview and the future print path, so there is no second
implementation for the preview to disagree with.
The preview is fed with the log's latest contacts rather than lorem ipsum: real
data shows a too-narrow column immediately.
Printing (PDF, one page per label at exact size) is the next module; nothing
here prints yet.
With 'All my callsigns' the report spans F4BPO, F4BPO/P and TM2Q at once, and a
list mixing them says nothing about which one a confirmation belongs to — which
is the question that option creates.
The column appears only when the rows actually carry a station: the other
services return one, and an empty column for them would be noise.
The grouping keyed on the callsign alone, so every spot of a station outside the
first one's band and mode was dropped from the list. RI1FJL spotted on 17m CW,
20m, 30m, 12m and 15m FT8 showed as a single row: four slots gone from the one
view an operator uses to find them.
A duplicate is the dozen skimmers that all heard the same CQ — same station,
same band, same mode. The same station on another band is the opposite of a
duplicate; it is what the chaser is scanning for.
Expert Electronics' own document gives the command whole:
SPOT:RN6LHF,CW,7100000,16711680,ANY_TEXT;
16711680 is 0x00FF0000 — positive. This backend sent the same field as a SIGNED
32-bit value, from a third-party example: with the alpha byte set to FF for
opacity, 0xFFFFA500 becomes -22336, and a spot whose colour ExpertSDR cannot
read is dropped without a reply or an error.
Reported on ExpertSDR3 1.3, which speaks TCI 2.x — the protocol version was
never the problem, and my first reading of that report was wrong.
The first three spots are now logged verbatim: an ignored spot leaves no trace
whatsoever, so that line is the only evidence of what went out.
TCI meters: the S-meter came only from RX_SMETER and the transmit meters from
TX_POWER / TX_SWR — commands ExpertSDR3 does not send. The protocol's answer is
a subscription (RX_SENSORS_ENABLE / TX_SENSORS_ENABLE, §4.4 of the TCI PDF),
after which the radio pushes RX_CHANNEL_SENSORS and TX_SENSORS. Nobody had
asked, so the console's meters sat empty in RX and in TX while everything else
worked.
Cluster: the held-spot counter looked for the row it froze on. A station spotted
again REPLACES its row, so that row vanishes in the ordinary course of things
and the count fell through to 'everything is new' — 4, 5, then 500. Counted by
timestamp now, which survives both the replacement and the ring buffer.
SMTP: '535 5.7.139 basic authentication is disabled' is a policy, not a typo.
The message now says so, and says what actually helps, without claiming a policy
when the server simply rejected the password.
Every flush commits state the whole window re-renders on, and the window was a
flat 50 ms — twenty full renders a second under an RBN firehose. That is paid
everywhere else in the interface, and it is what a dropdown highlighting its
entries a beat behind the mouse actually is.
The window now follows the rate: 50 ms on a quiet cluster, where a spot should
appear the moment it arrives; 200 ms past five a second; 500 ms past twenty,
where half a second's delay on a line already scrolling past is invisible.
The pane drew its own title bar above the grid's toolbar, so the cluster spent
two lines on headers where Recent QSOs beside it spent one — in a pane often
only a few spots tall. The grid's toolbar now takes what the caller wants on its
left, and the pane passes its title, live count and Filters button there.
Reported by VK4DX.
UploadLoTW returns both a terse error ('no QSOs processed') and a Message
carrying TQSL's own lines — '17 QSO records were already uploaded', 'N QSO
records are out of date range'. The caller took the error whenever there was
one, which is precisely the half that explains nothing: the operator saw a red
line naming a condition with three unrelated causes and no way to tell which.
The sixth CW engine, and the one the TCI backend was left without. A SunSDR
keys from the WebSocket that already carries the CAT: no WinKeyer, no second
serial port, nothing to wire.
CW_MACROS:0,<text>; send
CW_MACROS_SPEED:<wpm>; speed
CW_MACROS_STOP; abort
Confirmed against the TCI command table in ars-ka0s/eesdr-tci — the source that
settled SPOT. CW_MACROS rather than TCI 2.0's CW_MSG: it exists from 1.6, and
OpsLog resolves its own variables, so the before/after callsign fields have
nothing to carry.
Commas and semicolons are stripped before sending. They are the protocol's own
separators: a comma would become another argument, a semicolon would end the
command with the message half keyed and the rest parsed as a command.
Only the MACRO speed is set, not the paddle keyer's — an operator who set their
paddle to 28 wpm did not ask for it to change because a macro went out at 25.
And there is no backspace: TCI can stop a message but cannot un-type one, so the
type-ahead correction the Flex engine offers is absent rather than faked.
Wails saves and restores in two different coordinate systems. WindowGetPosition
returns GetWindowRect — absolute. WindowSetPosition is winc's ControlBase.SetPos,
which adds the CURRENT monitor's work-area origin:
w32.SetWindowPos(hwnd, HWND_TOP, int(info.RcWork.Left)+x, ...)
On the primary monitor that origin is 0 and nothing shows. With a monitor to the
LEFT it compounds: a station with its left screen at x=-3840 saved -3844,
reopened there, had -3840 added, and stored -7684 — then -11524, one screen
further out at every launch, until the window was off the desktop entirely.
So the placement is done here, with SetWindowPos and no offset, falling back to
the toolkit when the handle cannot be found. Compact mode had the same pairing
and is fixed with it.
Clicking a spot sets the frequency, then the mode 150 ms later, and SetMode
chose USB or LSB from t.freqA — the frequency the radio had ECHOED. From 7 MHz
onto a 14 MHz spot that echo has often not landed, so the sideband was computed
for the band being left: LSB on 20 m. Clicking the same spot again, the echo
having arrived, gave USB. Reported from a SunSDR as 'the frequency is right, the
mode is wrong until I click twice'.
SetFrequency now records what was asked for and SetMode prefers it until the
radio's own echo confirms the move.
The server's 'protocol:' announcement is also kept instead of being filed under
unhandled: it names the ExpertSDR and its TCI version, and panorama spots need
TCI 1.5 — older servers accept the spot commands and silently drop them, which
is indistinguishable from a broken logger. Now it says so.
The status comes from spotEntityStatus: it means the country has been worked on
this band and mode. The label said 'Worked (this band + mode already in log)',
which reads as 'I have had this station' — so a spot the cluster called NEW PFX
looked like a contradiction, when the two were answering different questions
about different subjects.
The callsign-level fact has its own marker and its own words ('Callsign already
worked'), so the two are now told apart by reading them.
The strip deliberately shows three markers of five — the pill is 22 px and a
fourth segment makes it a colour code nobody reads. But the tooltip has room and
was filtering them out too, so the same spot read NEW PFX in the cluster and
'Worked (this band + mode already in log)' on the map. Both were true: the
entity is worked on that slot and the WPX prefix never has been. Neither view
said so.
A tester compared LogHX's two download options on the same account: two minutes
for the confirmations, twenty for the confirmations with QSO details. OpsLog was
always sending qso_qsldetail=yes — LogHX's slow option — which is the whole of
the wait people were reporting.
Marking a confirmation needs call, date, band and mode; the detail adds the QSL
date and the station's grid, state and county. Now a choice, off by default, and
forced on when the download is also ADDING the QSOs it cannot find — the one
case where those fields have no other source.
Miles and the LoTW download progress landed after v0.26.20 was tagged, so they
belonged to the next block: an entry appended to a shipped one never reaches the
operators who installed it, and misstates what that version contained. The .20
block is byte-identical to the tag again.
Three reports of the same shape: a 503 for anything wider than a few days
before, and since the timeout was raised, a window that sits at 'working'
forever. Both are the same missing thing — nothing said what the transfer was
doing.
The body is now read in chunks and every megabyte is reported. A 503/502/504 is
retried twice, 20 s then 40 s, each attempt announced: LoTW answers 'busy' to a
wide report often enough that other loggers simply ask again. And the deadline
is no longer on the whole exchange, which either cut off a healthy slow download
or hid a dead one for twenty minutes — it is ten minutes to START answering
(LoTW builds the whole report first) and two minutes of silence once it has,
which is the difference between slow and dead.
Everything is computed in kilometres and converted once at display time, in
lib/units — storing miles anywhere would give the same number two sources of
truth and a rounding error that grows with every hop.
The grids capture the unit inside their column definitions, header and formatter
both, so a change is published to them the way the date format already is;
without that a toggle would only appear after a language change or a restart.
The preference is portable, like the other display ones.
Without qso_qslsince LoTW does not answer 'every confirmation' — it answers
with a few recent ones, as a 200 and a valid ADIF. 'All' therefore downloaded a
nearly empty report and said 'matched 1 of 1' on an account holding twelve
thousand. It now asks from 1945-11-15, older than any QSO LoTW accepts.
And the request had two minutes: LoTW spends several of them building a full
account before the first byte, so asking for everything ended in 'context
deadline exceeded while reading body' — a network-shaped message for a
too-short deadline. Twenty minutes, and the read cap raised past the 18 MB such
a report actually weighs.
Unscoped, the report carries every station on the account — including the calls
belonging to another profile's logbook. Those match nothing here, and with 'add
the ones not found' ticked they would pour a second log into this one. The
station callsigns this logbook actually holds are now the filter: a portable
worked here is kept, an expedition call never used here is skipped and counted.
A near-empty report is also the failure that reads as success — 'matched 1 of 1'
where the account holds twelve thousand. Under 4 KB, what LoTW answered is shown
verbatim instead.
The download passes qso_owncall so one profile does not pull another's
confirmations. That scope also hides them: a QSO made as F4BPO/P is confirmed at
LoTW and can never come back to an F4BPO profile, so it stays unconfirmed here
for good while the ARRL counts it — found while reconciling a DXCC account
against the panel, where it was the whole of the CW gap (Jersey, worked as
F4BPO/P).
Off by default: the scope is right for anyone whose profiles are separate
stations.
The Challenge line says 1832 worked against 1554 confirmed and stops there —
278 band-slots waiting for a card with nothing pointing at them. Every existing
filter works per REFERENCE, so an entity confirmed on 20 m answers 'confirmed'
and its unconfirmed 15 m contact stays invisible.
The new filter keeps the references holding at least one such slot, and the
count beside the reference total is the gap itself, recomputed over whatever the
other filters left on screen and over the bands actually displayed — so it
always adds up to the columns in front of the operator.
The SOTA feeds put the summit in the spot's own text, so there is nothing to
poll: a regex on the comment gives the reference, and clicking the spot writes
SOTA@<ref> into the award references the way a park already wrote POTA@<ref>.
The regex is narrow on purpose — association/region-NNN, anchored — because
POTA (US-4475), WWFF (DLFF-0001) and portable callsigns (DL/SP9DPM/P) share
that field and none of them is a summit. Pinned by a table test.
Off by default: the reference is only there on the summit feeds, and an empty
column for every operator who does not chase them is worse than a checkbox.
The chip read a.spe ?? a.acom ?? a.pgxl, so a KPA fell through to the
not-connected fallback: red on a working amplifier, and a click that opened the
settings instead of switching to STANDBY. Reported from a KPA500 whose panel
showed band, SWR and temperature at the same time.
The card's offline text also borrowed the Acom's string, so a KPA that dropped
its link announced itself as an Acom.
The CI-V trace settles it: the IC-7851 answers 27 10 01 with FB and 27 14 00
with its mode, but refuses 27 11 in BOTH shapes — it controls its scope over
CI-V and never streams it. Its last firmware is from 2016, older than the
waveform stream itself; Hamlib's caps claim otherwise, the radio is the
authority.
Rejected both ways is a permanent answer, so it is remembered and reported:
the panadapter says the radio does not send its scope, which is the one thing a
black rectangle could not say.
The IC-7851 rejects "27 11 01" and wants "27 11 00 01" — the main/sub selector
its two scopes need. The shape was picked from a list of CI-V addresses, so an
address not on it got the wrong one and the scope stayed blank with a rejection
in the log and nothing on screen.
A rejection is an unambiguous answer, so a rejected 0x27 set is now re-sent in
the other shape and the winner remembered. A TIMEOUT deliberately is not
retried: several firmwares never ack a 0x27 set, and treating silence as a
wrong guess would flip a rig that was already working.
The dot is drawn over all five cell backgrounds, so it cannot borrow one of
their colours; it defaults to the theme foreground with a background ring and
now takes two overrides of its own, worked and confirmed, alongside the rest of
the matrix palette.
The worked-before cell answered one question with two facts fused into it.
bandStatusCode takes the highest of them, so a confirmed entity outranks a
worked callsign — right for awards, wrong while chasing: a slot worked with the
DXpedition this morning reads "entity confirmed" and says nothing about it.
BandStatus now carries the callsign's own answer alongside the entity's, and the
cell draws a dot for it. The dot is deliberately identical everywhere — same
shape, same colour, over all five backgrounds — so it is read as one thing
rather than as five variants of the colour underneath it.
It has not shipped yet, so an operator reading about the SunSDR console
should meet what it does — not a list of repairs to a thing they have
never run.
Reported with a Logger32 export: the record said <DXCC:3>151 and OpsLog
stored 54.
cty.dat answers one question — where is this callsign TODAY — and that is
the wrong question for a log. R1MVI was Malyj Vysotskij Island, entity
151, until the ARRL deleted it in 2012; the same call resolves to European
Russia today. Forcing the lookup onto a 2004 contact therefore destroys a
credit that can NEVER be worked again, because the place no longer counts.
So the ADIF's number wins whenever it names a deleted entity, and nothing
is corrected on those records at all — the country name and the zones of a
deleted entity are equally beyond what a present-day prefix table knows.
The list is the ADIF specification's own enumeration, sixty-odd entities
that only change when the ARRL deletes another one.
The guard sits in the forced path, so it also covers the grid's 'Update
from cty.dat' on a selection — the other way an operator could have lost
the same credits, one right-click at a time.
Two things from one screenshot, and the second is arithmetic rather than a
bug.
Editing an award refreshed the grid and not the statistics matrix, so
changing which confirmations count left the table showing the old rule's
numbers with nothing to mark them stale. That is how a setting comes to
look as though it does nothing.
And OpsLog's 3229 against LoTW's 3004: the Challenge counts confirmed
band-slots on ten bands, and 60 m is not one of them. 3229 less the 224 in
the 60 m column is 3005. So the number was right and the QUESTION was
different — the panel now answers the Challenge one too, under the table
where the comparison is made.
The two totals also say what they are on hover. 'Total' and 'Général' side
by side tell nobody which counts entities and which counts band-slots, and
3309 read as entities is an impossible number — which is exactly how it
was read.
A spot at 10131.5 showed as DATA in the cluster list and raised an alert
announcing SSB. Two tables answered the same question: the frontend knew
10.130-10.150 is the 30 m data segment, while the alert engine knew a CW
range that stopped at 10.130 and ended with a bare 'return SSB' for
everything else.
That fall-through was the fault. A band plan that answers 'SSB' for
anything it does not recognise is not a band plan, it is a default wearing
one — and it fed the alert text, the FlexRadio spot colours and the mode
the radio is told to switch to.
The Go table is now transcribed from the frontend's, segment for segment,
and returns nothing where it knows nothing. The order matters and is now
load-bearing — the FT8 and FT4 watering holes are listed BEFORE the wide
data blocks they sit inside — so there is a test that fails if anybody
sorts the table by frequency and quietly turns every FT8 hole into DATA.
WPM counts as CW while we are here: nothing else is reported in words per
minute, and RBN puts it on every line.
Reported on an Ultrabeam over USB: the port could not be chosen from the
dropdown, and the panel would not scroll.
That field was a Combobox — a list you can also type into — chosen so the
port of an adapter currently UNPLUGGED could still be configured. It is
now the same Select every other serial device in OpsLog uses, the one that
demonstrably works. The case it was built for is kept differently: a
configured port that is no longer detected is added to the list, so it
stays selected and visible instead of vanishing when the adapter is out.
Also hardened the Test button's guard, which called .trim() straight on
the port and the host. A settings object without them — an older build, a
save that landed short — throws there DURING RENDER, and a panel that
throws while rendering is exactly a panel with a dead dropdown that will
not scroll. Whether or not that is what this operator hit, it is a way to
produce both symptoms at once and it costs nothing to remove.
Reported with a screenshot: the map came up with API KEY REQUIRED written
twice across the middle of it, on the Light and Voyager views only. Those
are exactly the two Carto basemaps.
Nothing here could have caught it. The tiles still answer 200 with a real
image — the watermark is IN the image — so the map looks like it is
working and simply says otherwise in large grey letters.
Both views move to Esri, which is already behind Street and Satellite. That
is the point: a second key-free provider is a second chance to be cut off,
and this is now the third time a tile source has changed its terms under
us. Light is Esri's light canvas with its own label layer, and Voyager
becomes the topographic map, labelled Topo — the stored key stays
'voyager' so nobody who chose it is quietly moved somewhere else.
The canvas runs out of tiles at zoom 16 where the others go to 19, so
maxNativeZoom is set per basemap: Leaflet upscales the last real tile
instead of asking for a level that does not exist, which is the difference
between a slightly soft map and a blank grey square.
Written into the entry itself rather than added as a line of its own:
somebody reading about the feature should learn it there, not two entries
further down.
The columns took the award's declared band list when it had one, so every
band the award PERMITS got a column whether or not anything had ever been
worked on it. DDFM permits 6m and 70cm; a station that has never worked a
French department on either was shown two empty columns, which reads as a
gap in the log rather than as a band nobody tried.
They now follow the bands this operator actually has contacts on for the
award. The declared list is the fallback for an award with nothing worked
yet — there, saying what the award is played on is the only honest answer
available — and the classic HF set is the fallback for an award that
declares nothing either.
Together with taking the order from the full band list, this is what puts
23cm on DDFM: the column appears because there are contacts on it.
The columns were the intersection of the award's bands with a fixed list
that ended at 70cm, so a band the award genuinely covers could not appear
whatever it said. DDFM is worked well into the microwaves and had no 23cm
column, and nothing anywhere would have produced one.
The intersection is now taken against every band in frequency order, the
same list internal/award already sorts its own band counts by. The classic
HF-plus-2m-and-70cm set stays as the fallback for an award with no band
list and no contacts yet — the full list would be twenty-nine columns of
mostly nothing.
Reported from a station running an IC-7850 over USB: with split engaged,
turning VFO B moved VFO A slightly. OpsLog writes nothing to that radio on
its own — but it shares it, and what it was sharing was wrong.
Hamlib's 'f' means the VFO IN USE. RigState follows ADIF, where FreqHz is
where we TRANSMIT, and the two are the same number until split is
engaged — so the adapter handed FreqHz over unchanged and every client
asking for the dial was given VFO B. A client that reads the dial and
writes it back, which is what WSJT-X and its like do, then wrote VFO B's
frequency into VFO A. Hence a shift the size of the split offset, and
hence 'it did not do this before': it only happens with split on.
get_split_freq ('i') already answers the transmit frequency and is
untouched. The one-line rule is lifted into shareRXFreq with a test that
includes this case, the simplex case, and a backend that reports split
without ever filling in the receive frequency — which would otherwise
answer a client with 0 Hz.
Two faults, and the first was a design mistake of mine.
The choice was written only as the award override, to keep the imported
CNTY as a record of what HAMLOG said. But CNTY is what the comparison
READS, so the contact went on disagreeing for ever: settle a hundred
rows, run the comparison again, get the same hundred back. The reasoning
was about preserving evidence; the effect was a button with no visible
consequence anywhere, which is indistinguishable from one that does
nothing. This is the operator's own log, and correcting a field in it is
the point of the exercise. The district now lands in CNTY as well as in
the award reference.
And the settled rows stayed on screen, which made the same button look
broken a second time. They are dropped as they are applied — locally,
rather than by re-running the comparison, which reads the whole log and
would be seconds of silence on a remote database to be told what is
already known. The agree/disagree counters follow.
Reported by VK4DX with the case that names itself: YB confirmed on 20m
digital, painted blue, because one unconfirmed YB station had also been
worked on that slot.
The ladder ran call_c > call_w > dxcc_c > dxcc_w, so a callsign worked and
not confirmed beat an entity CONFIRMED on the same band and mode. The grid
answers 'what do I still need here', and a confirmed entity needs nothing
whoever was worked afterwards — so the order is now call_c > dxcc_c >
call_w > dxcc_w.
Two things made it easy to get wrong, and both are fixed rather than
merely corrected. The code was a run of assignments where the later test
silently overwrote the earlier, so 'call worked' erased 'entity
confirmed'; it now takes the maximum. And the rule lived inside a scan
loop where nothing could reach it, so it is lifted into bandStatusCode
with a table test — including this exact case, and one that fails if
anybody reorders the constants.
The comparison could show two hundred contacts where the log and the
database name different districts, and leave the operator with nothing to
do about any of them but open each QSO and edit it by hand.
Now each row carries the two values as buttons: click the district you
keep, then apply. There are shortcuts for keeping one source everywhere,
and applying is a separate act — clicking through two hundred rows with
each one written as it is clicked would make a slip permanent before the
reading was finished.
The choice is written as the contact's AWARD REFERENCE, not over the
imported CNTY, and that distinction is the point. CNTY is what the
downloaded log said; overwriting it would destroy the evidence the
comparison runs on, and the next comparison would agree with itself and
prove nothing. The override is the operator's decision, it is what the
award engine counts, and it beats both sources. So the log keeps saying
what it said, the database keeps saying what it says, and the contact
counts for the district that was chosen.
The buttons show the districts themselves rather than a tick box: someone
arbitrating between RO-19 and KO-05 should be picking a value they can
read, not remembering which source a checked box stood for.
rouggy