Logger32's WinKeyer debug against the K3NG that will not answer OpsLog is a
capture of the exchange working, on the same keyer and the same port:
Sent: 13 13 13 00 04 55
Rcvd: 55 (72 ms)
Sent: 00 02 Host open
Rcvd: 23 (WK2 v23)
That is the sequence I already send. The difference is the grouping: Logger32
puts the three nulls and the echo probe in ONE write, and we split them with a
50 ms pause and a buffer purge in between. On a keyer that reboots when the
port opens, that pause is a window for it to come up mid-sequence and swallow
half of it — and there was nothing to wait for, since a null produces no reply.
The handshake bytes are now logged unconditionally, not behind the diagnostic
option. "No WinKeyer answered" cannot be told apart from a wrong port, a wrong
baud rate, a keyer still booting, or another program holding the line. The
bytes can, and it is four lines per connect attempt.
0.25.3 shipped with its two entries — the verified-confirmation fix and the
native SPID rotator — and they are two separate subjects, so there was nothing
to merge this time.
Version constants untouched: the release script owns them, and it already
bumped them to 0.25.3 in the commit before this one.
Same bug as yesterday's, one screen further on. The QSL Info table maps the
statuses it knows — Y, R, I, M — and falls through to "No" for anything else.
ADIF's V is anything else. So a contact confirmed AND validated by LoTW was
reported as not received, in the one place an operator opens to check.
V now has its own label, Verified, in the green of a confirmation, and it is in
the dropdown too. That second half matters more than it looks: a select whose
value is not among its items renders blank, so a verified contact looked like
nothing had been recorded — and the operator's next click would have replaced
the strongest confirmation they hold with whatever they picked instead.
The QSL Manager's bulk list is deliberately left alone: it sets paper QSL
status across a selection and defaults to "leave", so it never displays a
stored value, and "verified" is not something a paper card can be.
An operator with a tower at each end and an AlfaSpid on both wanted OpsLog to
talk to them directly. Multiple rotors were already there; the missing half was
the protocol.
Rot2Prog and Rot1Prog, over the controller's own COM port. The byte layout is
in the package doc and pinned by table tests against Hamlib's spid.c, the
reference implementation — including the one trap this protocol has: digits go
out as ASCII and come back as raw bytes. Send raw and the controller ignores
you; read as ASCII and every heading is wrong by a constant nobody would
recognise as such.
Two things the UI has to get right because they cannot be detected: the dialect
(different reply length AND baud rate) and the baud list, which for a SPID is
600 or 1200 — offering the usual 4800-and-up would have left the controller
permanently mute. Both are handled: picking SPID sets serial transport, 600
baud and Rot2Prog, and the baud dropdown changes to the rates these use.
The connection test reads a status rather than moving anything, so a wrong
dialect shows up there as a reply of the wrong length instead of as an antenna
that behaves oddly an hour later.
Untested against real hardware — I have none. The frames are pinned; the
controller is the only thing that can confirm the rest.
An operator's screenshot had it side by side: the Awards panel showed Morocco
validated on five bands, and the band/mode matrix two inches above showed the
entity as merely worked.
ADIF's QSL_Rcvd enumeration has both Y and V — "received" and "verified" — and
V is what a LoTW download writes for a confirmation the ARRL has validated. The
award engine's isYes accepted "Y" or "V". Everything else in the app compared
against 'Y' alone: the worked-before status grid, the slot statistics, the row
colouring by QSL status, the awards QSO list, the call history badges. So the
confirmations an operator cares most about were the ones that did not count.
Now one definition per side, named so the next reader finds the other:
qso.ConfirmedValues on the Go side, used by the queries themselves, and
isQSLConfirmed in lib/qsl on the frontend, which rowColors and the panels call
instead of testing the letter.
The Go test drives the real query shape against a real database with a 'V' row
— the constant being right is not the point, the queries using it is.
0.25.2 is going out. The version constants are left alone — the release script
is the one source that bumps them, and touching them here would make its
"release commit already exists" check misfire.
Fourteen entries for ten subjects. "UDP" appeared four times and "Motorized
antenna" twice, which is one line per commit rather than one per thing an
operator notices.
The two new outbound services are now one Connections entry, everything that
was made loggable is another, and the antenna's two silences — a lost port and
a controller going its own way — read as the single symptom they produce.
The selector offered 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 and none of them took: the board stayed
at four relays.
The count is decided in three places — deviceRelayCount in Go, chanCount in the
Station Control panel, relayCountUI in Settings. The new type was added to the
first and the dropdown, and to neither of the others, so the panel resized the
labels from a helper that had never heard of it and fell straight through to
its fixed default. The Go side was right the whole time, which is why the
driver would have been built correctly for a count the operator could not set.
All three now know the type. A test pins the Go side against every count the
dropdown offers, and against the fixed boards, whose hardware decides and which
must keep ignoring the field.
An operator was about to build band→relay mapping into the custom URL rows.
It already exists, and better: relay auto-control has a per-relay "band" rule
driving webswitch, KMTronic, Dingtian, Denkovi and USB boards. It holds state
so a relay is only commanded when its wanted position changed, reads the
boards live before the first apply so it does not re-command one already in
place, and carries per-relay labels. A URL fired on a band change has none of
that, and would have been a second definition of "which antenna on which band"
— the drift that cost us a week on counties.
So the gap was only the hardware: a hand-made switch is none of the five named
types. It is now the sixth, "HTTP relay": an ON URL and an OFF URL, either as
one pattern with {relay} substituted, or one pair per relay. The per-relay
form is the reason it exists — these boxes often have URLs with nothing in
common between channels (…/FF0101 and …/FF0201), which no pattern can express.
Status is remembered rather than read: most have no endpoint worth trusting.
The cost is stated in the code and the panel — after a restart every relay is
re-commanded once, which is harmless on a board with no memory and far better
than assuming an antenna is already selected.
And the Connections panel now says so, exactly where the wrong choice is made:
picking a band change with a URL transport shows a note pointing at Station
Control. The URL transport stays — a lookup pushed to a webhook or a QSO to a
dashboard is an event, not a state, and Station Control has no place for it.
Two answers to "can people debug this when it does not work".
They could not. A custom UDP row logged "sent 18 bytes to 127.0.0.1:12000"
and nothing about the message — which is a template the operator wrote, so
the byte count says nothing about whether the substitution came out as they
meant. The payload is now in the line, with the trigger that fired it, for
custom rows only: an ADIF record or a binary WSJT frame on every QSO would
bury the log rather than fill it.
Worse was the silent case. A template that is a single placeholder the trigger
does not carry — {freq} on a band change — renders empty, sends nothing, and
looked exactly like a row that had never fired. It now says so, throttled per
row, and points at the field list.
And a password in a URL is redacted before it reaches the file. Storing
http://admin:secret@switch/ as typed was a deliberate choice for LAN gear;
writing it into a log that gets sent to whoever is helping is a different
choice, and was never made.
The Settings section is "Connections" rather than "UDP integrations", since it
has not been UDP-only since the URL transport landed. The log prefix stays
"udp:" on purpose — renaming it would orphan every log an operator has already
sent and every note anyone has written against it.
The hard-coded emitters each speak one published format at one fixed moment.
This is the escape hatch, and it exists mainly for antenna switches: they are
driven by a URL, and the band change is the trigger they want.
Four triggers, each carrying its own field set: band change (the RADIO's band,
not the entry form — a switch follows the rig, not what is being typed), QSO
logged, rotator command and callsign lookup. The panel prints the fields the
selected trigger can fill, which is the point of the whole thing: a placeholder
the trigger does not carry renders as nothing, and without the list an operator
writes {freq} on a band change and has no way to learn why the switch never
moved.
Three things the panel cannot show, handled here:
- Escaping. A URL needs every value percent-encoded; a UDP payload must not
be touched. The first portable callsign, F4BPO/P, puts a path separator in
the middle of a query string otherwise — it works on the bench and fails on
the air.
- Blocking. An HTTP call to a switch that is unplugged would otherwise sit
for the operating system's timeout, on the path of a band change. It runs
in the background with a 3 s limit.
- Silence. A switch answering 404 after a firmware update fails exactly like
success looks from here, so the status code is logged, throttled per row.
The rotator trigger hooks the COMMAND rather than the SP/LP buttons, so the
compass and a spot click fire it too, and the path ("SP"/"LP") is passed
through because an azimuth alone cannot say which was taken — 137° is short
path to one station and long to another.
Credentials in a URL are stored as typed. That is the operator's call, on the
grounds that this is LAN gear, and the hint in the panel says so.
"WSJT-X logged QSO (Logger32)" reads as Logger32-only, and it is not: the row
speaks the WSJT-X UDP interface, which several loggers listen on. An operator
running something else would have scrolled past a service that would have
worked for them.
Logger32 stays in the hint as the example it is — it is what this was built
against, and its additional sockets are where most people will point it — and
port 2250 stays as the default, a starting point rather than a rule.
The ADIF datagram reached Logger32's socket and still nothing appeared in its
log. WSJT-X sends TWO messages for every contact — QSO Logged (type 5), the
structured one, and Logged ADIF (type 12) — and receivers differ on which they
read: MacLoggerDX takes the structured one by default and offers the ADIF as
an option. We were sending only the half Logger32 does not use.
Both now go out on that row, in WSJT-X's own order. Nothing double-logs: any
receiver built for WSJT-X already sees both from the real thing.
Type 5 is read positionally, so the field order is pinned by a test against
NetworkMessage.hpp — one field out of place shifts every one after it and the
receiver files nonsense without complaining. QDateTime is Qt's own encoding:
Julian day, milliseconds since midnight, then the time spec, which is sent as
UTC (1) because a spec of 0 would have the receiver re-read the contact in its
own zone. The Julian arithmetic is checked against known values; a day out
there files every QSO on the wrong date.
"sent 1153 bytes to 127.0.0.1:2250" and nothing in Logger32. Both true: the
line the operator screenshotted is titled "Setup additional WSJT/JTDX UDP
sockets", and those receivers take UDP LOGGING PACKETS — the WSJT-X v2
protocol. A bare ADIF record posted to them is dropped without a word.
So there is a new outbound service rather than a change to the existing one:
"WSJT-X logged QSO (Logger32)" sends the same ADIF wrapped in a Logged ADIF
datagram (magic 0xadbccbda, schema 2, type 12), defaulting to port 2250. The
plain-text row stays for JTAlert/GridTracker-style receivers, because the two
really are different wire formats and one row cannot be both.
The id string is "OpsLog", not "WSJT-X": a receiver uses it to tell instances
apart, and impersonating the real thing would make a second WSJT-X
indistinguishable from us.
Tested both ways — the header byte for byte, and a round trip back through our
own ParseWSJT, since that is the same decoding every receiver applies.
Sahara moves to the parchment an operator asked for: page #e6ded0, panels
#f3eee2, toolbars #ded5c4, terracotta #c4501e on the buttons and the focus
ring. Lighter and less saturated than the deep sand it was.
Two silences from one operator's log.
The SteppIR is not blocked — it is being overruled. Every tune is commanded,
acknowledged on the next poll with the frequency asked for, then replaced on
the poll after by a different one: 21075 asked, 21075 confirmed, 21050
reported, again and again, with the operator tuning once more each time. Two
minutes of that reads as a dead link. It now says what it is, once, when the
motors have stopped and the reported frequency is more than 10 kHz from the
commanded one — a controller quantising to its own grid is not a fault, one
sitting somewhere else entirely is.
UDP outbound had no positive signal at all: only failures were logged. When
an operator sets up an ADIF message to a second logger and nothing arrives,
"OpsLog never sent it" and "the other program did not take it" looked exactly
the same from here — and the first is the common case, because a row created
as an inbound ADIF listener instead of an outbound ADIF message matches
nothing and emits nothing. Successful sends are logged with their destination
and service, and a QSO logged with no outbound row says so once a session.
The paper form had one "Via", which since the QSL_VIA split writes
QSL_SENT_VIA. QSL_RCVD_VIA had no way in at all outside the per-QSO editor —
a field with a column, an import and an export, and nothing to fill it.
Each direction now has its own route dropdown, sitting with the status and
date it belongs to: how the card was sent, beside Sent; how it came back,
beside Received. Both apply to the whole selection, which is the shape of the
job — a stack confirmed in one go usually arrived the same way, a bureau
delivery being exactly that, and doing it one QSO at a time in the editor was
the only option before.
Both store the ADIF enumeration (B/D/E), and neither touches QSL_VIA — that
holds the manager's callsign and belongs to the QSO, not to a stack of cards
being confirmed together.
The two columns were already available in the paper list: it renders through
RecentQSOsGrid, which gained them with the field itself.
Two problems from one operator's log, both of them the log's fault.
SteppIR. The last line about it is "status query failed, reconnecting: Port
has been closed" and then nothing — for the rest of the session. The poll loop
does retry every two seconds, but a failed open was a bare `continue`: no line,
ever. And startUltrabeam had three silent ways out — settings unreadable, the
antenna turned off, no port or host configured — so a cleared field and a lost
adapter produced exactly the same evidence, which is none. Both now say what
happened, with the port or host named. Reopen failures are reported three
times and then throttled (a port that is gone stays gone), and the recovery
says how many attempts it took.
FLDIGI. Four hundred "ADIF payload ignored" lines and nothing else legible.
The cause is in the same log: two inbound listeners on the SAME multicast
group and port, 239.255.0.1:2237 — one WSJT (MSHV), one ADIF (FLDIGI). Every
WSJT-X packet is delivered to both, and an FT8 cycle is dozens of decodes
every fifteen seconds; the bursts in the log are exactly 15 s apart. The ADIF
listener now checks for the WSJT-X magic and says so once, with what to do
about it, instead of rejecting each packet in writing. Anything else is
described a few times with its payload and then goes quiet.
An operator waited over a minute and the button never appeared; opening
Settings and pressing Cancel made it appear at once. That is the whole
diagnosis — Cancel was the only thing that re-read the option.
GetChaseNew returned the cached atomic, which exists for the MQTT goroutine
and is false until startup has read the setting. The UI asked while the
database was still opening, was told "off", believed it, and never asked
again. It now reads the setting, like the grid-chasing binding beside it.
The frontend asks again at the two moments this class of race resolves: when
GetStartupStatus returns, and when the first logbook load succeeds — the seam
that already re-reads the connection label for exactly this reason, with a
comment saying so.
The open/closed state was already remembered per machine; it is now in
PORTABLE_KEYS with the other widget toggles, so it travels with data/ like the
rotor and amplifier panels rather than being the one that does not.
Three cuts, all of them removing things nobody could act on.
The frequency column is gone. Clicking the row tunes the rig to it, so the
number was there to be read and never used. It is still carried on the spot —
the click is what needs it — and it is in the row's tooltip. The country takes
the space.
Modes are limited to FT8, FT4, FT2, PSK31 and RTTY. WSPR is the one worth
spelling out: it is a beacon, nobody answers a WSPR transmission, so a "new
entity on WSPR" is a path report and not a station to work — and on a quiet
band it would have been most of the list.
Bands are limited to the operator's own list. PSK Reporter carries every band
its receivers listen on, and a 13 cm decode is not an opportunity for a station
with no 13 cm.
Both tests run before the status lookup and both read a cached map: they throw
away most of the feed, so nothing downstream pays for it. The band list is
re-read when the lists are saved, so ticking a band in Settings applies to the
next decode rather than the next restart — which would have looked like the
filter not working.
Four things from an operator's first look at the panel, and one of them was
mine.
The frequency column showed "—" on every row. pskr.Spot.FreqHz was declared
and documented in one edit and never assigned in the next, so the payload's
"f" was parsed and dropped. A click therefore filled the callsign and left
the rig where it was, which is half the point of the panel. Assigned, with a
test that runs a real payload through and checks the value survives into the
Spot — the field being declared is what made it look done.
A row now carries ONE indication instead of stacking them. A station can be a
new band and a new prefix at once; the row says the first that matters, in the
order that would make an operator leave what they are doing: entity, band,
mode, slot, then prefix, then square. Two badges on one line made the list
unreadable at a glance, which is the only thing it is for.
Each category has a filter chip in the header, in its own colour, remembered
across sessions. A toolbar button shows the panel and a cross closes it — the
same split the Super Check Partial panel uses, where the setting decides
whether the feature exists and the button whether it is on screen.
The panel is wider and the country column gets what is left, which is more
than it was now that a row carries one badge.
An operator's keyer dropdown showed COM1 and COM3 twice, in the order
COM1 COM1 COM3 COM8 COM9 COM4 COM3, with "COM3COM3" as the selected value —
two entries sharing one value both counted as selected.
Not our bug to start with, but ours to absorb. Windows enumerates serial
ports from HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM, which maps a DEVICE PATH to a COM
name, so the same name legitimately appears twice when two devices claim it:
a driver uninstalled without cleaning up after itself, or virtual-port
software. go.bug.st/serial returns one entry per device, faithfully.
Deduplicated and naturally sorted in the one binding every port dropdown in
the app calls, so CAT, rotators, amplifiers and the keyer all get it. COM4
now sits between COM3 and COM8 rather than after COM9, which is how a port
gets overlooked on a machine with a dozen.
A dropped duplicate is logged rather than swallowed: two devices holding one
COM name is also a good reason for one of them to report that port busy, and
that is not something an operator can work out from a list.
PSK Reporter tells you what is actually being decoded in your region, which
is a larger set than what somebody chose to spot: nobody spots the FT8 caller
running ten watts from a rare square.
Almost all of it existed. The MQTT payload already carries frequency, mode,
transmitter and both grids; the watcher already drops any report collected
further than NearKm from the operator, which is exactly the question worth
asking — the station is being heard HERE, not in Japan; and with grid chasing
on the subscription is already every band, filtered at the broker by receiver
square, measured at 0.2 to 1.2 messages a second. This reads messages that
were arriving and being discarded.
"New" is not decided here. Every spot goes through ClusterSpotStatuses, the
same function the DX cluster grid uses and the same cached index, so the two
panels cannot drift apart the way the county columns did. Cost per message is
map lookups behind an option cached in an atomic, because the MQTT goroutine
must never wait on the settings store.
The option is its own, not nested under grid chasing: chasing squares and
chasing entities are different wants, and the feed now has three consumers,
any one of which brings it up and none of which cuts the others loose when it
goes down.
The panel says "digital modes only" in its footer. An empty list has to mean
"nothing new on FT8/FT4/JS8 near you", not "the band is dead" — it will never
show a new entity on CW.
The comment came out "SSB WAC EU WAZ 15 WPX HA5" — the QSO's materialised
award_refs hold both kinds, and I took them all. Those four are what every
reader of the spot derives from the callsign in their head. They spent the
whole 30-character comment saying nothing and buried SOTA HA/KM-018, the one
reference anyone would have acted on.
Computed awards are now filtered out with the same rule the QSO editor uses
(isComputedAwardField), which is why they are the ones it lists on the left
and not in its read-only panel. The field map moves from a ref to state as
well: a ref left the first spot of a session computing before GetAwardDefs
had answered.
Also opens 0.25.2, since 0.25.1 shipped before the spot work, and sets the
default mode list to SSB, CW, FT8, FT4, FT2, RTTY, PSK31, FM. AM and
DIGITALVOICE stay in the catalogue but are no longer selected on a fresh
install. FT2 joins the digital family everywhere its siblings are listed —
report list, RST defaults, Flex power class — so it gets dB reports rather
than the 59 an unknown mode falls back to.
After the mode, which is the order a cluster line is read in:
"CW POTA FR-11553".
Two sources, because the QSO can be at either stage. While it is being typed
the entry panel holds the references as "CODE@REF;CODE@REF"; once logged they
live on the row as the materialised award_refs. The Send Spot window takes the
entry's when there are any and falls back to the last logged QSO — the same
fallback the callsign and frequency defaults already use — and picking a QSO
from the Latest list fills in that QSO's own.
A self-spot is the opposite case and gets its own builder: it announces OUR
station, so it carries MY_POTA_REF and friends. Using the QSO's award
references there would spot us with the park number of the station we just
worked, announcing us from somewhere we are not.
Both cap at the 30 characters a cluster node keeps, and add a reference whole
or not at all — a truncated park number is worse than none, since nobody can
act on it, and it still costs everyone who reads the spot. Only the comment we
BUILD is held to that; what the operator types is their own business.
The K3NG entry added an hour ago is gone. It named one clone among many —
WKmini, home-built Arduinos, unbranded boxes — for hardware that speaks
exactly the same protocol, and it was the only line in the engine list that
picked a boot delay rather than a protocol. An operator with an unlabelled
clone would have had to guess.
The delay is now learnt per port. The first connect finds out by failing the
quick attempt and succeeding on the slow one; that fact is written to a
global setting keyed by the port, and every connect afterwards goes straight
to the slow attempt. Global rather than per profile on purpose: which keyer
is plugged into COM3 belongs to the computer, and switching profiles for a
different rig does not change the keyer on the desk.
Two tests hold the contract from both sides — a slow keyer must be reported
as slow, and a keyer that answers at once must not be, or every K1EL connect
would inherit seconds it never needed.
The operator's keyer is a K3NG — an Arduino running an emulation of the
WinKeyer protocol — which changes the diagnosis and nearly broke it.
Checked against K3NG's own source before anything else, because yesterday's
handshake now FAILS a connect where it used to press on regardless. It is
safe: k3ng_keyer.ino implements admin echo (0x04) and echoes the byte back,
0x13 is a documented no-op, and OPTION_WINKEY_STRICT_HOST_OPEN — on by
default — ignores every byte except 0x00 before host open, so the resync
nulls are dropped harmlessly and the echo probe still gets through.
The real cause is in K3NG's options file, beside the feature itself:
"disabling Automatic Software Reset is highly recommended", and an option
to "discard errant serial port bytes at startup" for when it is not. On an
Arduino, DTR is wired to reset through a capacitor: opening the port reboots
the board into its bootloader. Ours spoke 400 ms later, to a keyer that was
not running yet.
So the retry now waits 2.5 s, which recovers it without an operator pressing
connect twice, and the engine list gains a K3NG entry that skips the doomed
fast attempt altogether. Everything else is identical to a K1EL — same
settings panel, same protocol.
Fifteen entries for seven subjects — the block had "WinKeyer:" twice, "QSL:"
and "QSL designer:" four times between them, "US counties:" three times.
That is one line per commit, which is how it was written, not one line per
thing an operator notices. Merged, in both languages.
An operator's log showed the whole fault in its first line: "connected on
COM3 — no reply — the keyer did not answer Host Open", followed by seven
configuration commands and two calls sent as Morse. Nothing was listening.
Reporting a link as up and then writing to it regardless is the part worth
fixing; the handshake is why it was down.
K1EL's Application Interface Guide gives the sequence, and we did one step
of it. Now all of it:
- DTR on, RTS OFF. K1EL's own init sets DTR_CONTROL_ENABLE with
RTS_CONTROL_DISABLE, and on a serial WinKeyer those lines ARE the power
supply — DTR feeds the 3.3 V regulator, RTS provides the negative rail.
go.bug.st/serial defaults both to true, so we drove RTS high on every
connect without a line of code saying so.
- 400 ms after the lines come up, for a WK1 still booting off DTR.
- Three 0x13 nulls to resync the command parser. A keyer left part-way
through a command by whoever spoke to it last would absorb Host Open as
a parameter — the everyday cause of a silent WinKeyer, and one the
operator can do nothing about from the outside.
- An echo test (0x00 0x04 0x55) before trusting the port at all. This is
the step that answers "is there a keyer here", and connecting now fails
on it, with the byte that came back when something else replied.
The whole handshake is retried once, since the first attempt's nulls are
what clear a confused parser. Tested against a fake port that reproduces
each failure: absent, mid-command, and echoing but versionless.
copyDirContents wrote into a destination it never created, so the first
os.Create returned ENOENT. The caller was written as "ignore os.IsNotExist"
— meant for a design with no pictures at all — and that guard matched the
failed write exactly: nothing was copied, no error surfaced, and validation
two lines later reported "copied design is incomplete: hero photo file
img_… not found" with no way to tell why.
Three fixes, one cause:
- copyDirContents creates its destination;
- the caller stats the source folder instead of pattern-matching an error,
so a genuine copy failure is reported and rolls back both the row and
the folder;
- DuplicateProfile had the same defect in its own form — an INSERT … SELECT
that cloned the template rows and left their photos behind, giving the
new profile designs with no thumbnail and nothing to print. It now copies
row and folder together, per template, since each needs its id first.
A test reproduces the original failure: it fails with the exact ENOENT that
was being swallowed.
QSL_VIA is the manager. QSL_SENT_VIA and QSL_RCVD_VIA are the ADIF "QSL Via"
enumeration — B bureau, D direct, E electronic, M manager (import-only) —
and say how a card travelled. OpsLog had one column for all three:
- the import folded QSL_SENT_VIA into QSL_VIA whenever QSL_VIA was empty,
which is exactly a Log4OM export (it defaults QSL_SENT_VIA to E), so
OE6CLD saw "E" everywhere OpsLog shows the manager;
- QSL_RCVD_VIA was listed in adifPromoted with no column behind it, so it
was not stored, not kept among the extras, and not exported — dropped
outright on import;
- neither was ever written on export, so an import followed by an export
destroyed both;
- and OpsLog polluted the field itself: the QSL Manager panel wrote
"Bureau" / "Direct" / "Electronic", in full words, into QSL_VIA.
Two columns added (migration 0027), carried through the five places a
promoted ADIF field has to touch, with round-trip tests pinning the reported
case. The QSL panel now offers Bureau / Direct / Electronic for each
direction and stores the enumeration; the manager field is labelled as the
manager and holds only that. M is kept when a file gives it and never
written back out.
Existing logs hold a mixture of the two in one column. The repair is offered,
not performed: the count is shown once per log with a plain question, and a
"no" is remembered. It moves only where QSL_SENT_VIA is still empty, and only
values that normalise to the enumeration — a manager is a callsign and can
never be one of those six words, which a test pins against real manager calls.
An operator asked why K1SEI showed "Middlesex" in Info (F2) and "Lower
Connecticut River Valley" in the cluster. Two sources: the entry panel has
a callbook answer, a spot carries only a callsign so the cluster derives one
from the FCC licence ZIP through GeoNames — and GeoNames has followed the
Census in replacing Connecticut's counties with the 2022 planning regions.
No award, callbook or log uses those, so every CT station matched nothing:
new county for ever, and counting toward nothing.
Measured against a full ULS import (1 556 444 US callsigns), 23 223 resolved
to a name the USA-CA reference does not contain. Three causes, three fixes:
- Spelling. "City and County of San Francisco", "Baltimore (city)",
"Nome (CA)", plus counties renamed since the award list was drawn
(Kusilvak, Oglala Lakota, the Valdez-Cordova split) and Alaska's four
"X City and Borough", whose reference codes read "JUNEAUCITYAND" because
the county-type suffix strip eats the wrong end. Normalised in
award.USCountyKey, which both sides already go through. 7 515 callsigns,
no re-download needed.
- Doña Ana, NM shipped into the reference as "NM/DO̱AANA" — mangled by a
non-UTF-8 CSV line, a code nothing could ever produce, so that county was
unwinnable and silent about it. Row repaired, cntygen now refuses such a
line, and a test makes every one of the 3 102 references reproduce its own
code from its own name.
- Connecticut. A planning region is drawn from towns in several counties, so
no name maps to a name — only the ZIP can resolve it. cmd/ctzipgen builds
the table from the Census 2020 crosswalk, filling PO-box-only ZIPs from the
nearest resolved centroid; all 11 ZIPs GeoNames still labels with a real
county agree with the result. 15 037 callsigns, applied at import, so the
store now carries a rules version and Settings says when a re-download is
needed.
Alignment itself is the last piece: a spot now shows the county the station is
logged with when we have one, and falls back to the ZIP-derived county only for
stations never worked.
The sampled colours were Warm light's own (#faf6ea / #e8dfc9 / #ddd2b8) —
the annotated screenshot was that theme, and the request written on it was
"just a little darker". Keep the cream on panels and the entry strip, take
the page, tab bar, toolbars and table headers a shade deeper, and move the
accent from burnt orange to ochre so the two are told apart in the picker.
Built from the three sands an operator sent: #faf6eb for panels, #e8dfca
for the page behind them, #ddd2ba for toolbars, table headers and rows.
The ordering is what makes it work — a panel reads as lifted off the page
and the log grid as settled into it, so rows stay scannable without extra
rules. Ink is a deep warm brown; pure black on sand glares.
A second profile is usually the same operator with a different rig or a
different locator — same callsign, same cards. Having to redraw a design
because the antenna changed is work nobody should do.
The designer now lists the designs the active profile cannot see and copies a
chosen one into it. Designs it already sees — its own, and the shared ones —
are left out: they are not something to copy.
A COPY, not a move or a share. The original profile keeps its design untouched
and the duplicate is free to diverge, which it usually will: a second profile
exists because something differs, and that something often ends up on the card.
The PICTURES are copied too, and that is the part worth getting right. Stored
documents reference photos by name relative to the template's own asset folder,
so duplicating the JSON alone would point the new design at files that are not
in its folder. It is validated against its own folder afterwards, and a failure
rolls the row back rather than leaving a design whose pictures are missing.
Sharing the source's folder was the other option and a worse one: deleting
either design would then have emptied the other.
From a user's log, repeating throughout the session:
rigctld: split off failed: cat: this radio's backend cannot set split
rigctld: unimplemented command "X PKTUSB -1"
Both are answered with an error, and JTDX treats a rig-control error as fatal:
it abandoned a transmission 0.86 seconds into a 13.8-second frame.
"S 0" — split OFF. Fake It uses no split, and JTDX still sends this to be sure.
A backend that cannot SET split was refusing a request that was ALREADY
satisfied. It now succeeds when the rig is simplex, without touching the rig at
all. Arming still fails loudly: there the request is real and unmet, and a
client that believes it transmits up the band while the radio sits on the DX's
frequency is exactly what that refusal exists to prevent.
"X <mode>" — set_split_mode. Sent during ordinary setup, Fake It included,
where there is no second VFO to give a mode to. Accepted now: applied when a
split is in force, and a plain success otherwise, because the transmit VFO
already has that mode — it is the same VFO. get_split_mode answers to match.
Both regressions fail without the fix with the exact codes from that log,
RPRT -9 and RPRT -11.
Only PTT transitions were recorded. So when JTDX aborted a transmission
0.86 seconds into a 13.8-second frame, the log showed the abort and the Fake It
frequency restore around it — and not the command that preceded them, which is
the one thing needed to tell whether OpsLog answered something the client could
not accept.
Behind the existing CAT wire-trace switch rather than a new one: this is a line
per poll and would drown an ordinary log, and an operator chasing a rig-control
fault turns that trace on already.
The first version was a single switch meaning "command them all", and that is
wrong the moment a station has three: two SPE on a combiner and a PowerGenius
on another antenna would all go into OPERATE together, keying an amplifier that
has nothing to do with the pair.
It is now a set. Each amplifier is ticked into the group or not, the group is
stored as a list of ids, and an amplifier outside it keeps its own buttons —
which is the entire point of it being a set.
A group of fewer than two members is stored as none: one amplifier coupled to
itself would make every command fan out to a single member for ever.
A remembered member that is no longer running is skipped rather than failing
the command — deleting one amplifier must not break the button on the other.
An amplifier saved without an id cannot join, and the panel says so instead of
quietly omitting it from the list.
It sat above the first amplifier card. With three cards configured — the case
it exists for — that is a scroll away from anything the operator is looking at,
and it was reported as missing rather than misplaced.
Moved next to Add amplifier: coupling belongs to the SET of amplifiers, not to
any one of them, so it belongs with the other set-level control.
The SPE CO1-2 combiner is an RF device: it sums two amplifiers and commands
nothing. So "combined" operation is really two amplifiers that must be held in
the same state, and one left in STANDBY while the other keys means the combiner
sees power on a single input.
A switch in Settings → Amplifier makes ON, OFF and OPERATE act on every
configured amplifier. Offered only with two or more: coupling one amplifier to
itself is a switch that cannot do anything.
The METERS stay per amplifier, deliberately. Two amps combined are still two
amps, and an operator watching for one of them to run away needs to see them
apart — a summed bar would hide exactly the fault worth catching.
Fanned out in AmpOperate/AmpPower rather than in the UI: the card and the docked
widget both call these, and a coupling built into one would be missing from the
other, which on a combiner means one amplifier keyed and one not. The clicked
amplifier goes first, so a partial failure still did what the operator asked
before it stopped.
While linked, an amplifier with no power command — a PGXL on its direct link —
is skipped silently rather than reported: it would make a successful pair look
broken.
RI1FJL/MM resolved to Franz Josef Land while the expedition was still sailing
there, telling the operator they had worked an entity they had not.
The old behaviour was deliberate — the comment read "strict DXCC says no
entity, but the log should still show the operator's country" — and that is
wrong for exactly this reason. A home country on a maritime mobile is not extra
information; it is a false claim about where the contact happened, and it is
the kind of false claim that gets a QSO submitted for an award it cannot win.
Trailing only. A LEADING "MM" is the Scotland prefix and "AM" is Spain, so
MM0ABC and AM5X keep their entities — getting that wrong would be a far larger
error than the one being fixed. /P, /M and /B are unaffected: a portable
station is still ashore.
In the cluster the column says "Maritime mobile — no DXCC" rather than going
blank, because blank is what an UNRESOLVED spot looks like and the two mean
opposite things — one is "we don't know yet", this is "there is nothing to
know". Display only: the QSO's own Country stays empty, since that field holds
a DXCC entity name and there is none.
ADIF defines CNTY as "STATE,COUNTY" — "GA,BARROW". OpsLog wrote the bare county
name, which a receiving logger cannot resolve: county names repeat across
states, and there is a Washington County in thirty of them. The award engine
here was never affected, since it reads the columns rather than the ADIF; the
damage was to every file we hand to someone else.
One writer covers everything — writeRecord — so this fixes file exports and the
LoTW, Club Log, HRDLog and QRZ uploads together. MY_CNTY gets the same
treatment.
The county alone is still written when no state is known: a bare name is worth
more than nothing, and inventing a prefix would be worse than either. A value
that already carries a comma passes through untouched, so re-exporting an
imported record cannot double the prefix.
Import is the mirror: "GA,BARROW" fills both columns, and a file carrying the
bare county — as OpsLog's own older exports do — still imports unchanged. The
state parsed out of CNTY only fills a blank STATE, never overrides it: STATE is
the dedicated field and the more specific statement.
"An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host" during DATA
reads the same whether the server refused the SIZE, hit an hourly quota, or
simply dropped the socket — and only the first is something an operator can act
on. The message now carries host:port, the encryption in use and the total
attachment size, so the size can be ruled in or out without a second attempt.
A path that does not exist is not counted: the mail library skips it, so
reporting it would describe a message that was never sent.
Puts "F4BPO is on air 14,074,000 FT8 IC-7300" on hrdlog.net's front page while
the station is operating, which is what HRDLog's own "Automatic HRDLog ON AIR"
setting does.
The endpoint and its field names come from HRDLog's own library
(github.com/iw1qlh/HRDLOG-net-library, HrdProtocol.SendOnAirAsync): OnAir.aspx,
with Frequency in Hz, Mode, Radio, Callsign, Code and App. Read rather than
guessed — an invented endpoint would have produced a switch that silently did
nothing.
HTTPS where that library uses plain HTTP: the upload code is a credential and
has no business crossing the network in clear, and the sibling NewEntry
endpoint on the same host already serves TLS.
A heartbeat every two minutes, not a change notification — HRDLog drops a
station from the list when it stops hearing from it. Silent when switched off,
unconfigured, or when the rig reports no frequency: announcing 0 Hz would say
the operator is on air on nothing. Failures are logged, never toasted; a
broadcast the operator did not ask for at that instant must not interrupt them
every two minutes on a flaky link.
Its own switch beside auto-upload rather than folded into it: this is a live
status and needs the rig readable, not a QSO.
compactH was 158px, "tuned so the compact entry strip fits in a single row".
A constant tuned against a layout stops being true the moment the layout
changes, and this one outlived a strip that had since shrunk — leaving about
70px of empty window under the fields.
The frontend now measures what it rendered and asks for that height, watched by
a ResizeObserver so a strip that wraps at a narrow width is followed too. The
topbar is added as its declared h-8 rather than measured, since it is fixed.
Bounded in the backend: a measurement of zero — a layout not yet painted —
must not collapse the window, and the call is ignored unless compact is on so
nothing can shrink the normal window. Rounded to whole pixels so a sub-pixel
reflow cannot start a resize loop.
It went under the Station Control rotator; the compass that wanted it is the
docked one beside the entry strip. Both are the same RotorCompass, so the
readout moves INTO that component: every compass in the app carries it, and no
caller draws its own.
The bezel already showed the short path as a red marker, but a marker is a
direction, not a number — and the numbers in the status bar are 10px, which is
what prompted this.
Clickable only when the caller passed onGoto, since a compass rendered without
one cannot turn anything and a button that does nothing is worse than a label.
The same pair already sits in the status bar, where it is 10px and several
operators reported not being able to read it. Repeated under the compass at a
size that can be read across a shack.
Clickable, like the ones in the status bar: a heading you can see and not act
on would be a step backwards from what is already there. Disabled and dashed
when no station is entered, rather than showing a heading to nowhere.
The same answer the Details tab already gave, moved to where the county is now
typed — a badge in a tab nobody has open while working a station is a badge
that does not do its job.
Debounced at 300 ms and keyed on state + county together: the field is typed
into as well as filled by the lookup, and the check queries the log. A county
name means nothing without its state, so both have to settle before asking.
The looked-up values now sit directly under the geography line they continue —
QTH, State, locator, then county and zones — and the free-text fields close the
block. Reading order follows what the lookup fills, rather than interleaving it
with what the operator types.
Comment and Note moving onto one line left the right column two rows shorter
than the left, and this fills it: county, both zones and the ADIF entity
number. All four are filled by the lookup and were only visible after opening a
tab — the wrong place for values an operator wants to SEE are right before
pressing Log.
County is a name, not a code ("St. Tammany Parish"), so it takes the flexible
width and the three numbers get fixed narrow boxes.
Cleared numeric fields store undefined, not 0. Zero is a real DXCC number and a
real zone, so an empty box has to stay empty rather than assert something the
operator did not type.
State stays up on the geography line beside QTH and the locator, which is how
the lookup fills them and how they are read.
stateBlock was built and then not placed in the row — the field simply did not
exist on screen. Now between QTH and the locator, where it was meant to go.
Left column 210 → 230px, and Comment and Note move onto ONE line side by side:
two fields that are usually a few words each were taking two full rows of the
entry strip. That frees a row for whatever goes there next.
Name, Band, Mode and Country go from 300px to 210px, which moves QTH, Comment
and Note left by the same amount. The width is set in TWO places — the Name row
and the Band/Mode/Country stack below it — and they have to stay equal or the
two rows stop lining up, so both were changed together.
State goes between QTH and the locator: it is part of the same "where is this
station" reading, and it is what WAS and the US county work key off. Narrow,
since it holds two or three characters, and upper-cased on the way in like the
other coded fields.
The Name label in this layout was hardcoded English while its twin went through
t(); fixed while here.
A log greets an operator; it does not address an envelope. "Robert Smith"
filled the Name field with something no one would ever send on the air, and it
is the first name that gets used when the contact is answered.
So fname alone, with the surname kept only as a last resort for a record that
has no first name at all — better a surname than an empty field. The nickname
option now falls back to the first name too, which is what it should have done
from the start.
joinName went with it: nothing composed a name any more.
QRZ publishes <nickname> — the name an operator goes BY on the air — and
OpsLog was composing fname + name instead. "Bob" is what belongs in a log;
"Robert J Smith" is what belongs on a licence.
QRZ only, and deliberately so: HamQTH's <nick> already fills the Name field
that way, so the same switch there would toggle a behaviour it has no way to
turn off.
A published nickname is optional, so an empty one falls through to the
registered name. That is the whole point of it being a fallback rather than a
swap, and it is what the test pins — a blank nickname must never blank the
name.
Spots were bounded by COUNT alone, so on a quiet band a two-hour-old spot sat
on the band map looking like something to chase. Settings → DX Cluster now
takes a lifetime: presets at 5/10/15/30/60 minutes, or any value up to twelve
hours, and 0 keeps the old behaviour.
Spots are REMOVED from the shared list rather than hidden at render. The
cluster list, every band map and the counts all read that one array, so pruning
it once is what makes the setting mean the same thing in every view — the
lesson already paid for when the band map ignored the cluster's filters. It
also gives the memory back.
A spot whose timestamp will not parse is never dropped: an unreadable stamp is
a reason to distrust the clock, not to throw away the spot.
Swept every 30 seconds — close enough that a 5-minute setting is honoured, and
invisible next to the spot stream. Clamped in the backend as well as the UI.
Reported on BH2SWB and 4X9AA: both flagged NEW PFX, neither ever worked, both
vanished the moment "hide worked" went on.
The predicate hid a spot when worked_call OR status === 'worked' — and that
second one is the ENTITY's status, not the callsign's. So any spot in an entity
worked years ago disappeared, however new it was for something else.
The extra markers are orthogonal to the entity status; the band map already
says so in as many words. They now win: a new prefix, county, grid or park is
never hidden, whatever the entity says. A worked entity that is new for nothing
is still hidden, which is what the filter is for.
Extracted to spotIsWorked in lib/spotDisplay, beside the other rule the cluster
and band map share, rather than left inline in a predicate that has already
grown once.
This repo has no frontend test runner, so this is verified by build and reading
rather than by a test.
Replaces the four fixed rules with the model Logger32 uses and the operator
asked for: Worked / Confirmed / QSL sent / To be sent, and inside each, which
channels count — paper QSL, LoTW, eQSL, QRZ.com. No ticks means every channel,
because a rule the operator has not narrowed must not quietly become a rule
about nothing.
"To be sent" is FIRST in the order, and that is the substantive decision here.
A contact can be confirmed on LoTW and still owe a paper card; the colour an
operator scans for is the one meaning "something is still owed". Placed after
"confirmed" that row goes green and the card never gets printed.
"Worked" is the catch-all — nothing sent, nothing requested, nothing back — and
is off by default, since turning it on paints every remaining row.
R and Q both count as owed: ADIF says requested and queued, and both mean the
card has not gone out.
"The ON button does nothing" has three different causes — the modem-line pulse
was refused, the pulse went out and the amplifier ignored it, or the amplifier
woke and the UI missed it — and the log could not separate them: it recorded
one combined error and never said whether the amp came up.
RTS and DTR are now reported separately (not every USB-serial chip honours the
modem lines, and some refuse them without saying so), alongside the model and
transport. A watcher then logs whether the amplifier answered within 15
seconds, off the caller's goroutine so the click still returns at once.
No change to the wake sequence itself, which is the part that took a long time
to get right on the 1.3K-FA.
"Was the grid in what WSJT-X sent, or did OpsLog put it there?" is the first
question asked when a contact is logged in the wrong square, and a byte count
cannot answer it. An expedition logged at its licence holder's home QTH stayed
undiagnosable for exactly that reason.
One line per QSO, around 280 bytes, whitespace collapsed so the record sits on
a single line.
Grid: RI0FA transmitted QN35 all evening and was logged with its licence
holder's home square. WSJT-X's logged ADIF usually carries no GRIDSQUARE, so
the lookup was the only source left — and QRZ/HamQTH describe where an operator
LIVES, which for an expedition is the wrong side of the planet.
The square heard on the air is now applied before the lookup runs, so
refineGrid has something to defend. It still upgrades a 4-character square to a
6-character one from the same field, and still refuses a finer square from a
different field.
SPE: decodeCSV marks the client connected on every frame it parses, and the
poll goroutine can be mid-read while PowerOff runs. The frame from a second ago
landed after PowerOff had marked the amp offline and put it straight back,
which is why OFF had to be pressed twice.
Frames are ignored for three seconds after the off key goes out — the window is
opened before the key is sent, so nothing already travelling can beat it. Time
bounded rather than latched: an amp switched back on at its own front panel has
to reappear without being told.
Reported: ten fresh contacts upload and appear on LoTW; twenty older ones,
bulk-edited to exactly the same LOTW_SENT/RCVD state, are accepted by OpsLog
and never arrive. The operator's reading was that a failed attempt could not be
overridden. It is simpler and worse than that.
TQSL's exit codes, from its own cmdline documentation:
8 NO QSOs were processed — already uploaded OR OUT OF DATE RANGE
9 some processed, some ignored — same two reasons
14 some already uploaded, the rest signed
8 and 9 were both read as plain success. So on 8 — nothing uploaded at all —
OpsLog announced "already uploaded (duplicate)" and stamped every selected
contact as sent. They were never on LoTW and now looked as if they were, which
is exactly the reported symptom, and it is not recoverable by re-uploading
because the operator has no reason to try.
"Out of date range" is the cause that bites here: a contact older than the
callsign certificate's validity is silently left out. Older QSOs failing while
today's succeed is the signature.
Now: 8 is a failure and nothing is stamped — a duplicate left at "R" is
harmless and will be refused again, whereas a contact wrongly marked sent is
one nobody will look at twice. 9 and 14 succeed but carry Ignored, and the
caller says so in the console and a toast.
TQSL's own sentence ("20 QSO records are out of date range") is captured and
shown. It was being read and thrown away, and it is the whole answer to "why is
my contact not on LoTW".
Two BandMap instances, and cleaning up a duplicated attribute took the prop off
the docked one as well as the copy. The multi-band tab drew the badge; the map
beside the entry form — the one actually in front of the operator — did not.
Logger32 draws a green square for a LoTW user and an X for a worked one. The
square is the part worth copying; the way it is drawn is not.
Colour on this map is already spoken for — it carries the entity status, and
the left edge of each pill stacks the new-park / new-county markers. Adding a
green fill for LoTW would put two unrelated meanings on one channel, and an
operator would have to work out which green meant what. So it is the same "L"
badge the cluster list draws, in the same muted blue, for the reason written
there: whether a station uploads to LoTW says nothing about whether the spot is
worth chasing.
Worked stations already read as worked here — the pill goes grey and the
status markers speak — so no X is needed.
Switchable in Settings → Appearance, and on by default: a `configured` flag
distinguishes "saved with this off" from "saved before the option existed", so
turning it off sticks instead of being undone by the next default.
The band map received the raw spot stream filtered by band alone, so none of
the cluster's filters reached it: switching on "LoTW users only" changed the
list and left the panadapter showing everyone. The same was true of hide
worked, the spotter continent, and the status and mode chips.
The predicate is extracted and shared rather than copied — two views of one
spot stream disagreeing about the same spot is the fault lib/spotDisplay
already exists to prevent, and a second copy would have drifted the first time
a filter was added.
The BAND filter is deliberately excluded from the shared part: a band map's
band is its filter, and applying the cluster's would empty every map but one.
The first version filled the whole row at 24%, and in a real log that meant
every row was painted: nearly every contact has SOME QSL state, so colour was
present everywhere and stopped being information — a striped background with
the data behind it.
The default is now a 3px stripe down the left edge. Same signal, nothing lost
to read it. A filled row is still offered, with a strength slider, for
operators who want the block — and the rule cards in Settings preview whichever
is chosen, so the decision is made by looking rather than by imagining.
Drawn as an inset shadow rather than a border: a border would shift the cells
three pixels on coloured rows only, and the columns would stop lining up.
Style and strength are normalised rather than rejected — a value out of range
is a slider that got away, not a reason to reset the operator's colours.
The "to send" rule only looked at qsl_sent, so a contact waiting to go to LoTW
— marked R, and the commonest not-gone-out-yet state in a digital log — matched
nothing and stayed uncoloured. It now covers any route still queued, and the
label says so.
New Settings → Appearance section: whole-row colouring in the log grid driven
by QSL / LoTW state, each rule with its own colour from a palette or a free
picker. What Logger32 does, with one difference that matters — the colour is
applied as a 24% tint, not a fill. Logger32's grid is white; this one is dark,
and a saturated user-picked colour behind white text is unreadable at exactly
the moment the operator is scanning for what still needs sending.
Rules are ORDERED and the first match wins, because a contact is usually
several of these at once: one confirmed on LoTW and by card is confirmed, not
"sent, awaiting reply". The order lives in the data so the panel can show the
rules in the order they actually apply, numbered.
The colour is interpolated into a CSS color-mix(), so anything that is not
plainly #rrggbb is refused on the way in and falls back to the default.
Also fixes the QSO number column, which was empty for contacts logged from
WSJT-X: that path inserts through the repo directly and never reached AddQSO.
Rather than chase each of the remaining bulk-insert paths — the POTA hunter
import and the LoTW/QRZ "add what I was missing" passes, which insert OLD
dates and so shift every number after them — the index now checks its length
against a COUNT and rebuilds when they disagree. One indexed count beats
remembering to invalidate in a place that does not exist yet.
OrderedIDs scanned qso_date straight into a time.Time. The column holds a
formatted STRING — the repo writes it with Format(isoMillis) and reads it back
through parseTimeLoose everywhere else — so the scan failed on every call, the
index was never built, and omitempty then dropped the zero from the JSON. A
column that shipped blank.
Scans the string and parses only the newest row; the ordering already came from
SQL, so 30 000 parses were never needed.
Tested against a real SQLite file with the date stored exactly as the repo
writes it, and with the ids running opposite to the dates — the imported-ADIF
case that is the whole reason this is not the id. It fails without the fix with
the scan error itself.
Not the id: the primary key follows insertion order, so importing an old ADIF
gives the oldest contacts the highest ids. This is a rank over qso_date.
Computed over the WHOLE log, not the query result — ranking inside the result
would renumber every contact the moment a filter is applied, and QSO #1 would
change identity as the operator typed.
Held as one id-to-rank map, built from a single ordered id query and dropped
with the other derived indexes when the log changes. A contact logged from the
entry form is the newest, so it takes the next number without rereading the
log: AddQSO deliberately avoids full invalidation because a contest run would
pay for it once per QSO. A contact entered with an OLDER date belongs in the
middle of the order, so there the map is dropped and rebuilt rather than
mis-numbered.
A batch that never reaches the disk looks exactly like one that does: the
locators are in memory either way until the next restart, which is the one
moment the difference shows. The shutdown flush was the least observable of
all — it runs last, and nothing said whether it had written anything.
Audit of every field a lookup returns against what OpsLog can store, prompted
by a report that HamQTH was not fetching the email.
The email was never broken: pinned now against a captured HamQTH answer, it
parses and reaches the QSO. The reported callsign simply has no public address
on HamQTH, which the empty field could not distinguish from a fault — so the
"[email protected]" placeholder is gone. A greyed-out sample address in the one
field an operator checks to see whether the lookup found one reads as a value.
Real gaps found and closed:
- web: the qso table has had the column since migration 0003 and no provider
mapping ever read it. HamQTH sends <web>.
- picture: Result.ImageURL was documented "QRZ only" because HamQTH's element
is <picture>, not <image>. It was there all along.
- zip: sent by both providers, read by neither.
- adr_name: used only as a fallback when a record carries neither nick nor
name. Deliberately NOT preferred over <nick> — a log wants the name the
operator goes by on the air, "Igor", not "Igor Vladimirovich Getman".
The parse tests use a real captured payload, including the stray <div> advert
the server injects into its own XML.
The chips in Settings only ever shaped the PSK Reporter SUBSCRIPTION. Neither
feed path checked them: both asked bandopen.Watched, which says which bands the
detector is capable of and knows nothing about the selection. So the cluster
path announced every watched band regardless, and widening the subscription to
"+" for grid chasing let PSK Reporter do the same — a station with only 6 m
ticked got 10 m and 2 m badges.
The selection is now cached beside the on/off flag and checked on both paths,
and unticking a band puts its badge out: badges fade on a timer fed by spots
the detector no longer looks at, so it would otherwise stay lit until a
restart.
The store shipped without its main source. Locators came only from this
station's own WSJT-X decodes, which is what the whole MQTT discussion was
about.
PSK Reporter now feeds it through a new OnGrid callback, fired before any
geographic filtering: what the store wants is "which square is this callsign
in", and that is true whoever happened to hear the report.
The subscription filters on the RECEIVER's square, a level the v2 topic
exposes. Measured on the live feed: the four opening bands unfiltered are 83
messages a second, of which roughly one in a hundred survived the NearKm test
that already existed here — the rest was received, TLS-decrypted, JSON-parsed
and discarded. One ring of squares is 0.2 to 1.2 a second.
By square rather than by DXCC, which was the obvious alternative: one country
measured 1.2 messages a second (OH) against 72.5 (K) on a single band, because
a DXCC can be a continent. By square the same measurement is 0.2 to 1.2, so the
load follows distance — what the feed is actually about — and is the same for
every operator.
Grid chasing subscribes with the "+" band wildcard, so one subscription per
square covers every band instead of one per band per square.
The store gains a source column (decode | mqtt), migrated in place on an
existing file.
The callsign->grid map died with the process. Every restart began with an empty
Locator column that took an hour of listening to refill, and everything learnt
the day before was thrown away.
internal/gridcache is its own SQLite file in the data directory, not a table in
the settings database: that one sits wherever the operator chose to put it,
often a synchronised folder, and a store that rewrites itself every minute has
no business there. Deleting the file costs a few days of listening and nothing
else.
Callsign is the primary key and the newest report wins — operators move, go
portable, go on expedition, and a stale locator is worse than none for grid
chasing because it reads as a square already worked. Entries not seen in two
years are pruned at open: that is the one way this cache can be actively wrong
rather than merely empty, and it is what bounds a store that would otherwise
only grow.
Only CHANGES are queued. The feeds repeat themselves, so writing every report
would put the whole stream in the batch instead of the news in it. Batches
flush on a timer and on shutdown — a restart is exactly when the cache is worth
the most.
Rotation is switched off while the store is attached: the cap would discard
callsigns the database still holds and the lookup would then miss what we know.
Age in the store is the bound instead.
The cache dropped EVERY entry once it passed 20 000. That was survivable while
the only feed was this station's own WSJT-X decodes, which never reached the
ceiling — it is a cliff for anything larger, and every locator in the cluster
list would disappear at once, periodically, for no reason the operator could
see.
Two generations: when the current map fills it becomes the previous one and a
fresh map takes over; lookups consult both. A rotation therefore costs the
older half and nothing more. It needs no insertion order, no per-entry
timestamp and no bookkeeping on the write path — all of which "evict the
oldest thousand" would require, on a path that runs once per decode.
The cap is 100 000, measured at 82 bytes an entry: 8 MB a generation, 16 MB
for both. 20 000 was chosen when the ceiling was unreachable anyway.
Both maps now go through rememberDecodeGrid / lookupDecodeGrid. Rotation swaps
the map headers, so the read had to be guarded; routing every access through
one accessor is what makes that checkable rather than remembered.
Entries had grown to 250-450 characters, carrying the symptom, the mechanism
and the reassurance about existing setups. The panel is read top to bottom;
that belongs in the commit message, which has no length limit and is not
competing for the reader's attention.
"Watch for band openings" only ever governed the extra DATA SOURCES — the RBN
nodes and the PSK Reporter feed. The detector itself ran on every ordinary
cluster spot regardless, so an operator who had never enabled the watch still
got 10 m and 6 m opening banners from a feature he had deliberately left off.
The flag is cached on bandOpenState rather than read per spot: this is the
cluster hot path, where a settings query per spot is exactly what the rest of
this file avoids. startBandOpenFeed owns it, and it already runs at startup and
on every save, so the switch takes effect without a restart.
Switching it off also clears the live badges and the accumulated spot window.
The badges only fade on a timer fed by spots the detector no longer looks at,
so they would otherwise hang there until the next restart; and dropping the
window means switching back on starts from what is on the air rather than from
an hour-old burst. The remembered openings are kept — those really happened.
Hidden from the filter panel and forced off, without touching the machinery
behind them — it is correct and took several rounds to get right, so it stays
whole.
One flag in lib/spotDisplay does both jobs: readSpotDisplayOptions answers
false while it is down, which covers the band map, and App.tsx seeds its two
states from that same call instead of reading localStorage directly. Without
that second half an operator who already had "No colour on worked" saved would
have kept it applied with no switch left to turn it off.
The saved preferences are deliberately left in localStorage rather than
cleared, so whoever had either option on gets their choice back the day the
switches return instead of silently starting from off.
Two dates side by side put each one in a half-width Field2, which spends 120px
on its label column — the second label overlapped the first input and the row
ran off the panel. The comment ten lines above says exactly this about the
group/subgroup fields; one per row, as everything else in this editor.
Also shows a far-future end date as open-ended. RDA carries 9999-12-31 as "no
end" and printing it back reads like a real deadline.
The claim that an empty per-reference window inherits the award's is now a
test rather than a comment: a QSO before the award's own ValidFrom does not
count for a reference that has no window of its own, and a narrower reference
window still applies on top.
References are not forever: a park is delisted, a district merged, a castle
loses its number. A QSO made while the reference existed is a valid contact
and must keep counting; one made afterwards must not.
The JSON format did not need to change — ValidFrom/ValidTo were already on
awardref.Ref, already columns in award_references, already round-tripping
through export and import. They were simply never read: awardRefMetas dropped
them on the way into the engine, so nothing downstream could enforce them.
This carries them through and checks them in keepRefs.
Empty means the award's own window governs, which inScope already enforces for
every QSO in the award. That fallback is deliberately NOT duplicated per
reference — two places enforcing the same dates is two places for them to
disagree. The editor shows the award's dates as the hint under the boxes so
the operator can see what empty inherits.
Dates are compared as ISO strings rather than parsed times: the stored shape
is "2006-01-02", lexical order on it IS chronological, and this cannot fail on
a malformed value the way a parse can — a reference with a typo in its window
keeps counting instead of silently vanishing from an operator's totals.
The Explain trace names the date and the cutoff, because "did not count" on a
contact the operator remembers making is exactly when they need to be told it
is the reference that has a window, not their log that is wrong.
Only the whole-catalogue bundle was reachable from the UI, so sharing one
award meant handing over every award you have — including the ones you edited
for yourself.
Nothing new was needed underneath: ExportAward(code) already existed and
already reads the definition AND its references from the database rather than
from the embedded catalog, which is the point (a WAPC is only worth sharing
because of the province list and city regexes the operator added). The English
and French strings existed too. Only the button was missing.
Kept distinct from the catalog publish next to it: that one stamps a version
and clears user_edited to seed a release, this one is a plain share and leaves
both alone, so the recipient's copy is correctly marked as someone else's work
instead of a pristine built-in that future catalog updates would overwrite.
The band buttons in Station Control tuned to a fixed mid-band frequency baked
into the frontend. An operator who lives in the CW segment, or in the FT8
window, got the antenna resonant somewhere he never operates and had to nudge
it every time. The SteppIR's own controller has a Frequency (KHz) column per
band for exactly this; this is that column.
Stored sparsely: a band with no entry uses its default, so nothing migrates
and an operator sets only the bands he cares about. Left empty the Settings
box shows the default as its placeholder, which makes clearing it the obvious
way back.
The value is checked against the band plan before it is kept, because it goes
to the antenna as a tune command — a lost digit (1450 for 20 m) or kHz typed
as MHz would send the elements travelling to a length wrong for the band the
operator is on, and on a SteppIR that journey inhibits transmit the whole way.
A rejected entry is logged and the band falls back to its default.
Resolution happens in the backend and rides on the existing status poll, so
the widget no longer decides where a band button goes and cannot drift from
what Settings shows. Its own table stays only as a floor for the first poll.
The follow loop only ever had one behaviour — re-tune once the rig moved
further than a fixed step. The SteppIR's own controller software offers three,
and operators arrive with that mental model: every frequency change, past a
threshold, or only on a band change. They are real operating trade-offs, not
preferences: "always" keeps resonance perfect at the cost of motors running
constantly (and on a SteppIR every move inhibits transmit while the elements
travel), "band" moves them a handful of times a day.
"Always" is implemented as the threshold mode with a 1 kHz threshold rather
than as a separate branch, so all modes keep the one deadband reference that
matters: the rig frequency last commanded for, NOT the antenna's own reported
frequency — a SteppIR flips its reported frequency between the commanded value
and its home value, which would re-issue a SET on nearly every poll and leave
the operator permanently unable to transmit.
Band mode compares against the band last COMMANDED for, not the rig's previous
band, so the first move after startup and any move made by hand still get
reconciled. It applies to the immediate spot-click path too: a click inside the
band the antenna is already resonant in moves nothing.
An unset or unrecognised mode resolves to the step mode, so every config
written before this option behaves exactly as it did.
Also routes the antenna settings block through t() — it was hardcoded English.
The card is two grid columns wide and sits beside a tall neighbour in Station
Control, so a single row of four bars left the height unused and squeezed each
bar into a quarter of the width. Two rows of two fill the room already there
and double the resolution of every bar.
The PowerGenius XL card gated its whole meter row on flex.amp_available, so
on any station without a FlexRadio it rendered OPERATE and the fan selector
over an otherwise empty two-column card — reported from a TS-590 station.
Nothing was missing from the backend. internal/powergenius already parses
forward power, drain current, VSWR and temperature out of the GSCP status
frame, and the docked AmpWidget already prefers the radio's meter stream and
falls back to those. Only the full card never learnt the fallback.
Same source preference as the widget, and the same two exclusions: peakfwd
and peakid are latched maxima that are never reset and survive in the
last-known status after the amp disconnects, so the plain readings are used
and gated on the transmit state instead of freezing on the last over.
WSJT-X "Fake It" shifts the dial for the duration of each over and puts it
back afterwards, but the restore is conditional: it reads the frequency back
and only moves the dial if it disagrees with where it believes the radio
should be.
That read lands inside the window where this backend stops polling on
purpose. A Kenwood answers "?;" to IF; while it is transmitting, and treating
that as a fault used to drop the shared CAT link entirely, so the cached
state answers instead. SetFrequency wrote the command to the rig without
touching that cache — so mid-over the cache still described the pre-over
dial, WSJT-X read its own receive frequency back, concluded there was nothing
to restore, and the radio stayed on the transmit frequency. Every later over
started from there.
Reported from a session where the dial stuck at 7075500 after a full FT8
over while a bare TUNE, which never sets a frequency, worked fine.
Only simplex updates the cache. Under split, FreqHz is the transmit frequency
while the write lands on whichever VFO the operator is on, and guessing which
side moved would put a wrong number in front of the operator — a stale one
survives until the next poll.
The test reproduces the reported sequence and fails without the fix with the
same frequency the log shows.
A 2 m opening was announced at 9650 km towards Japan. The callsigns gave it
away — 7M4RRM, JA7RPC, JF1AWC — all working EME, which is routine on 2 m and
reported to PSK Reporter like anything else. Real contacts, real grids, and no
evidence whatsoever about the band: an operator turning a beam on that bearing
would hear nothing.
Removing the flat 2400 km ceiling was right; it threw away genuine multi-hop Es
on 6 m. "No limit anywhere" was the overcorrection. The limit is per band now,
and it is physics rather than a threshold: 2 m reaches a few thousand kilometres
by tropospheric duct or a chain of Es clouds and no further, so 3500 km, and
4 m 4000. Six and ten metres keep no ceiling — multi-hop Es and F2 genuinely do
go round the world, which is the case that started all this.
Pinned from both sides: the 9650 km Japanese burst produces nothing, and a
2000 km 2 m burst in one sector still counts.
The UDP path applies the station profile, the DXCC number, the Club Log
exceptions, the zone refinement and the QSL defaults — and its comment says
"same as the manual AddQSO path", which it was not. applySolar and fillDistance
were never called there.
For an operator running digital, and that is most of the traffic on most
stations, it meant SFI, A, K and distance were empty across the whole log while
a hand-logged contact carried all four. It also quietly undermines the
history-based propagation work, which needs those numbers to be there.
applySolar now refuses a QSO more than a day old, whichever path it arrives by.
The UDP feed and the ADIF monitor normally carry contacts seconds old but
neither promises it — a logger re-broadcasting its backlog, or an operator
typing last month's contact by hand, would be handed this morning's SFI as
though it had been measured at the time. A wrong reading is worse than a missing
one: afterwards nothing tells it apart from a real one.
Width should follow use, and these two are nowhere near equal: a manager's
callsign is typed constantly, a QSL message almost never. The message held 7
columns of 12 for text most operators never write, while the field beside it —
often a long "via" instruction — was the one running out of room.
Swapped, so QSL via takes 7 and the message 5. Also puts them in the order they
are reached for.