The rest between two series was two minutes — four overs on FT8, by
which time the DX has worked four other callers and half the time has
gone. It is now counted in the station's OWN overs and is one by default:
seven calls, one over listened through, and it goes again if the station
is still there. The deadline lands mid-cycle on purpose, so "sit out one
over" means one over rather than depending on a millisecond of clock
skew.
A period the target was DECODED in is never counted as a miss. A period
is judged more than once — decodes arrive in a burst and stragglers
follow — and a later judgement holds a partial view of it, not evidence
of absence: D2ACE answered in the very period the counter then read as a
miss.
The readout moved out of the Auto button and beside it. "Auto D2ACE 1/7
·1/3" read as one number, and the control changed width every period.
The callsign is now the biggest thing on the row, the calls and the
missed periods each carry a label, the miss count appears only once there
is one, and a station being waited for gets its own amber chip.
A decoder sends a period's decodes in a burst, and stragglers follow — a
deep decode a second behind the rest. The sweeper judged the burst and
CLEARED the buffer, so the straggler opened a fresh one under the same
period key and was judged on its own: the ladder applied to a handful of
late arrivals with the other thirty stations of that period nowhere in
sight, and often after the reply to the burst had already put us on the
air, where nothing can act on it at all.
The buffer now outlives the judgement. A period stays open until a decode
stamped with the NEXT slot arrives; a straggler appends to it and the
period is judged again, whole. Judged once per period otherwise — acDirty
says whether anything new has come in — and the same flag now answers the
dead-band case that the cleared buffer used to stand for.
The watch list was a tab, and an operator working FT8 lives on the decodes
one: a station they had asked to be told about turned up on a screen they
were not looking at. The same answer is now docked in the widget strip,
above the tabs, reduced to what is worth acting on — on the air and still
needed, one row per band and mode, with the cluster's own NEW DXCC /
NEW BAND / NEW SLOT badge and a click that tunes. Off by default. The
"active and needed" answer costs a debounced query per visible slot, so it
is written once (lib/watchlistSpots) and the tab uses it too.
Auto-call:
- It answers a new prefix, county, state, square or park. Those markers
are orthogonal to the entity, they ranked as nothing-needed, and the
engine sat through a never-worked WPX prefix calling CQ. New rung at
the foot of the ladder, gated by the chase switches the badges use —
which meant making those switches portable, since the backend cannot
read localStorage.
- It calls THROUGH a pileup. Giving up the moment the DX answered
somebody else is precisely how a queue is not worked; the call and miss
counters already bound the effort, and a station in mid-exchange is
still never chosen as a new target.
The PSK Reporter panel now follows the station auto-call is waiting for:
the analysis takes a history query and a period or two to fill, so
starting it when the DX comes free is starting it too late.
Callbook lookup: a compound callsign with a page of its OWN keeps that
page's location. QRZ files HP/WE9G under exactly that form, with the
Panama square the station is operating from, and the rule that drops a
home address from a portable call was throwing it away. The record's own
country tells an operation's page from a home page.
Changelog: entries may open with [NEW], drawn as a pill in the What's new
dialog — a release is mostly fixes and the two or three genuinely new
things should not have to be found by reading all of it.
Six faults from an evening on 60 m, all in the same family: the engine
judging a station by what the log wants from it and forgetting what is
already under way.
- An exchange was abandoned mid-QSO. The reply lands in the same period
the ladder is re-read, and that period was judged before the reply was
taken into account, so a better-ranked caller took the slot from a
station that had just come back to us. The answer is settled first now,
and our own report counts as being inside the exchange too — which also
protects a QSO the operator started by hand.
- A station just picked started with misses against it. Its transmit slot
was unknown until a second decode, and with the parity unknown every
period counted, including the one spent transmitting to it.
- The freed slot after "it is working somebody else" was thrown away: the
period's decodes are in hand, so the next station is picked from them
rather than fifteen seconds later. Never mid-over.
- Auto-call is never armed from a stored setting — not at launch, not on
a profile switch. It is the one feature that puts the station on the
air by itself and OpsLog starts with Windows.
- It says what it is waiting for: a wanted station in a QSO with somebody
else now shows beside the Auto button instead of looking idle.
- Switching profile left the previous logbook's verdicts on screen. The
worked-index, chase-new and the frontend's cached verdicts are dropped
when the logbook changes.
FT decodes: distance column, a message addressed to you set whole in
green (the station you are calling keeps a tint — most of what it sends
goes to other people), badge order L / Wkd / WL, list cleared when the
RIG changes band.
Rotor: new world-map compass from EC1KD's design, with the Ultrabeam boom
and second lobe restored and the compact form preserved; the classic dial
is kept and Settings → Rotator chooses between them. Stop no longer
flickers on a rotor standing still — movement was inferred from a degree,
less than the jitter a controller reports at rest.
Six faults, all found on the air this evening and all in the same
feature. The decision trace added here is what found the first one:
one line per period, saying what was on the air and why each station
was refused.
- "worked" was read from the ENTITY's status, which means the country
is in the log on this band and mode. On 10 m, where most countries
are, twenty decodes out of twenty-one were refused as worked — the
watched DXpedition among them. The entity decides what is NEEDED;
the callsign's own slot decides whether calling it is a duplicate.
candidateOf() is split out and tested because one line was wrong for
weeks and nothing could catch it.
- A multi-answer line was read only up to its first message. MSHV
answers two stations in one transmission ("YV5ALI RR73; F4BPO
<HK0/PY8WW> -08") and the second half was a report to us: the engine
saw a station working somebody else and dropped the target at the
moment the DX was answering. The decodes panel already read every
segment.
- The slot after a QSO belongs to our own 73. Handing straight on to
the next station took it, switching the DX call mid-sequence, and
the frame that closes the contact never went out whole.
- A station CALLING US is answered whether or not the log wants
anything from it. It was refused for having nothing to gain, so a
QSO would end, two stations would call, and both were ignored.
- Callability was tested when a station was CHOSEN and never again
while it was held: one picked on its CQ that then answered another
caller went on being called for the whole seven attempts.
- A watched callsign now outranks every station that is not on the
list. Lifted one rung at a time it sat at the bottom with nothing
needed from it, and was never reached on a busy band — the opposite
of what putting it on the list means.
Halt is now a verdict: the station is set aside for the session rather
than released, and the chase list does not override it. The attempts
cap lets the over finish instead of cutting the call that counted it,
and a rest is a rest. Only what the decodes list is SHOWING can be
called — the panel publishes the callsigns it shows, so there is one
definition of "shown" and not two.
rouggy