An unselected satellite was a four-pixel dot with a one-pixel white edge, and
the basemap decides whether that is visible at all: a pale marker vanishes into
pale terrain, a grey one into a dark ocean, and the operator can switch between
the two in one session. So: a dark halo under a white ring around a larger dot.
Two rings, because no single colour reads on both.
The ones above the horizon now carry their name. Not all of them — a dozen
labels is a map nobody can read — but the two or three an operator is choosing
between right now, which is what saves hovering each grey dot in turn to find
them.
Hovering said "name · elevation · altitude", none of which decides anything.
What decides whether to reach for the radio is how long is left, how high it
will get and where to point, so the tooltip now carries the pass: elevation and
azimuth with its compass point, distance with an arrow for closing or receding,
rise and set with a countdown and a direction, and the peak. A bird already in
view shows its SET countdown instead of its rise — that is the number that
matters at that moment. No pass in the window says so, because a blank reads as
a fault. It costs no extra prediction: the pass list on screen is indexed by
name, and the first entry for a name is its next pass.
The tooltip also had to stop closing itself. The layer is rebuilt every five
seconds as the birds move, and a rebuilt marker is a new marker, so the detail
being read disappeared mid-sentence. The map now tracks the pointer and reopens
the tooltip of the dot it is still on — that one only, so nothing hangs open
once the mouse has moved away.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
The satellite page configured its own EasyComm or PstRotator link while five
other backends were configured in the rotator list. An operator with one az/el
mast therefore described it twice, and could describe it differently the second
time — a station that works on HF and not on a pass, for no reason visible
anywhere on screen.
Now every interface lives in Settings ▸ Rotator, once, and the satellite page
stores only a KEY into that list plus the tracking policy that is genuinely its
own (minimum elevation, step, park). The key and not the index: deleting the
first rotor must not silently point the tracker at a different mast.
migrateSatRotator() turns an existing satellite link into a real entry in the
list, selects it, and clears the old keys so it cannot run twice.
Which rotors have an elevation axis is now a question with one answer, in Go:
rotatorTypes plus rotorHasElevation, exposed to the panel by GetRotatorTypes.
The dropdown, the labels, each backend's default port and default baud all come
from there, so TypeScript no longer keeps a second copy of the same knowledge to
drift out of step. Three cases do not follow from the type alone and are treated
as such: PstRotator forwards elevation to a mast that may not have any, so the
operator says; a SPID's dialect decides (Rot1Prog has no elevation in its reply
format); and an ARCO and an ERC-M speak the same GS-232 while only one of them
lifts.
Each interface carries an Az / Az+El badge beside it. The satellite rotor
dropdown LISTS the azimuth-only ones, disabled, rather than hiding them: an
operator who owns one rotator and does not see it concludes OpsLog cannot find
it, where a greyed row saying "azimuth only" teaches the actual thing.
ERC-M by DF9GR is new — the az/el interface for a Yaesu G-5500. It emulates
GS-232, so internal/rotator/gs232 grew the elevation half: W for a two-axis
move, C2 to read both, falling back to C+B for the firmware that answers C2 with
the azimuth alone. That fallback is the point of the parser tests: reading such
a reply as "elevation zero" would put the antenna on the horizon, which is the
one wrong answer that looks plausible.
EasyComm II is promoted to an ordinary rotator interface, so it can also turn
the antenna from the compass and from a spot click.
The ERC-M is UNTESTED on hardware. Its Test button reads BOTH axes rather than
just the azimuth, so a controller wired for azimuth alone says so there instead
of during a pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
The rigs and antennas are already declared once, in Settings ▸ Operating
conditions — a station per rig with its antennas hanging off it — and
then typed again into every contact. That is work, and it is a source of
spellings that do not match: "IC-7610", "IC 7610" and "ic7610" are three
different rigs to an award, to a filter, and to anyone reading the log
later.
Both fields now offer that list, in the entry form and in the QSO editor,
and the antenna field offers the antennas of the rig that was picked
because that is the structure the tree already has. It falls back to all
of them for a rig the tree does not know, so an operator typing a
borrowed rig is still offered their own antennas rather than nothing.
Free text stays allowed throughout — a contact made from somebody else's
station, or imported from another logger, carries a rig that was never in
this tree and must still be loggable. Same rule the satellite-name field
follows.
And the decodes list gains a ceiling of two thousand rows. The rolling
half hour was never a limit on a crowded evening — three decoders put
several thousand rows inside it — and the panel slows down long before
the age cut removes any of them, because each row is a layout, a status
lookup and a distance. Past the ceiling the oldest go: what has already
been scrolled past, rather than the period being read.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
A Flex 6700 owner's log: no connection attempt of any kind, and six
saves each answered with
cat: settings saved, link unchanged - staying connected
His settings were right — FlexRadio selected, 192.168.1.154, port 4992,
and the detector had found and named his radio back at him. What was off
was the master CAT switch, which sits above the radio dropdown.
Three things, because each of them failed him on its own.
The log line was false on both counts: a disabled CAT has the signature
"off", so every save took the unchanged branch and announced a link that
was staying connected when nothing was connected at all. It now says CAT
is switched off, which is the fact he needed and the only place it could
have reached him.
The panel says it too, where he was actually looking: a notice under the
switch while it is off, because everything below it can be perfectly
right and still connect to nothing.
And choosing a radio now ticks the switch. Picking a brand, typing an
address, running a detector and clicking the radio it found are all one
gesture — "connect to this" — and making the operator find a separate
master switch afterwards is a trap. Nothing here ever turns CAT off on
its own; they can still untick it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Reported on an IC-7610 shared through OmniRig: clicking a CW spot put
the radio in CW-R every time, and the only way out was to edit the
OmniRig rig file by hand.
OmniRig's model has two CW modes, PM_CW_U and PM_CW_L, and nothing in it
says which one an .ini calls plain CW. Icom rig files disagree with each
other — on some PM_CW_U is CI-V mode 0x03 (CW), on others 0x07 (CW-R) —
so asking for "CW" is a question with two right answers and OpsLog was
only ever giving one of them.
Settings ▸ CAT ▸ OmniRig now carries the answer for THIS rig, and it is
pushed to a radio that is already connected rather than waiting for a
reconnect: which bit a mode maps to is not worth dropping the link, and
with it WSJT-X's rigctl session. Same shape as the Yaesu RTTY sideband,
for the same reason.
Nothing changes for anyone whose rig file already agrees with us.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Three things reported together.
Preferences said the section name twice: a small line above every panel
repeated the heading right underneath it — "GENERAL" over "General" —
while the sidebar next to them already shows which section is open,
highlighted. Two lines and a highlight for one fact; the small line goes.
The band matrix opens on the digital row the operator chooses. Its
digital row has always rotated — DIGI, then each digital mode in their
own list — but it always STARTED on DIGI, so somebody who only works FT8
clicked through to their own mode on every callsign. Settings ▸ General
now says where the rotation starts, and the dropdown offers exactly the
modes the matrix rotates through (the phone-mode rule is now shared
rather than copied, so the two cannot drift). DIGI stays the default: it
is the right answer for anyone working several digital modes.
And the MQTT chip is gone from the status bar. That is the name of a
message protocol, not of anything an operator has — a chip in the status
bar has to say what it is about, and this one told nobody anything. What
it carried is shown in the Chase New panel, which is the place that uses
it; its poller went with it.
Logging a contact from a piece of paper — a contest sheet, a friend's
report, a QSO worked on another radio — means the frequency, the band,
the mode, the date and both times all have to stop following the rig and
the clock at once. That is a single decision, and it was five clicks in
five different places, each of which had to be found first.
The padlock beside Start UTC now holds all five and releases all five,
with the same behaviour as before: locking pre-fills the times so the
fields are not empty, unlocking hands them back to the clock and snaps a
QSO already in progress to now.
The five per-field locks stay underneath. Everything downstream reads
them, and individually they say the right thing — "this value is
decoupled from the rig". Only the control is one.
This tab began as the relay and rotator dashboard and stopped there: the
three things an operator touches most — the radio, the CW keyer, the
voice keyer — were the ones missing from the page that claims to show the
station.
The radio card carries the frequency and the mode large, because that is
what gets glanced at, and the split pair only when there IS a split: a
second frequency shown at all times is one more number to read past. When
CAT is down it says which kind of down — switched off, or on and not
answering.
The CW keyer card carries the speed, which is the control an operator
reaches for mid-QSO when a station comes back faster than expected, and
Stop beside it because a message going to the wrong callsign has to end
now. The voice keyer card carries the recorded messages themselves: a
card that only said "idle" would be a light, not a control.
Each polls its own binding and holds its own state, like the supply card
above them, so they drop into the grid and reorder with everything else.
The two keyers appear only when there is something behind them — a port
configured, a message actually recorded — because an operator who works
neither should not be handed two dead cards. That question is asked once
on opening the tab: a keyer is bought and wired, not something that
appears mid-session.
Typing a cluster macro cost two things per character. The state lived on
SettingsModal, so every keystroke in one of those twenty-four boxes
re-rendered the WHOLE preferences dialog — every list, every form, every
panel. And the save wrote through to Go and into the database on each
one: a round trip per character.
The editor is now its own module-scoped component with its own state, so
a keystroke re-renders twelve rows. And writeUiPrefDebounced holds the
database write until the typing stops, while the local cache — which is
what everything reads back — is still written at once. Pending values are
flushed when the page goes away, so typing and immediately closing does
not lose the last word.
The behaviour is unchanged: still saved as you type, still no Save
button, because a text box whose contents only take effect on some other
button is how work gets lost.
Also folds the satellite changelog into one [NEW] entry. Satellites are
new in this version — nobody reading the notes has seen any of it — so a
running account of how it was built, tab then tracking then rotator then
where the settings moved to, is the wrong shape. One entry saying what it
does.
Setting up a telnet cluster is the step operators get stuck on. The
address and the port are two pieces of information nobody has to hand,
and a typo in either looks exactly like a node that is down — there is
nothing to read, only a connection that never comes.
So the editor offers a list, and choosing one fills the fields. Six to
begin with: F4BPO, DXFun, SOTA, POTA, and the two Reverse Beacon feeds —
listed separately and named for what they carry, because they are one
network on two ports where 7000 is CW and RTTY and 7001 is FT8 and FT4,
and no amount of trying will tell you which is which.
The preset then gets out of the way. Everything stays editable, the name
is only filled when the operator has not chosen one of their own, and a
node typed in by hand behaves exactly the same. Reopening a node created
from a preset shows it selected, so the list also answers "which one is
this".
Click the heading. Within each PERIOD and never across them: the slots
are what this panel is — what was on the air in one fifteen-second
window — and a list sorted end to end would mix three minutes of decodes
into one column of numbers with no way to tell which window any of them
came from.
One click sorts the way that column is worth reading — strongest signal,
lowest frequency, furthest DX, A to Z, most wanted — the second reverses
it, and the third gives arrival order back. Arrival order stays the
default and stays one click away, because it mirrors the decoder's own
window line for line, which is what makes the two screens comparable at a
glance.
Status ranks by the cluster's own order, so the two views rank the same
things the same way, with the markers that are orthogonal to the entity —
a new county on a worked country — sorted above the plain duplicates.
A station that never sent a grid cannot be placed, and an unresolved
country is not a name: both sort to the end whichever way the column
goes, rather than pretending to a distance of zero and heading the list
under "nearest first".
The map answers "where is the satellite over the earth". This answers
"where do I look", which during a pass is the question that matters.
The projection is the one every tracker uses and every operator already
reads: the centre is the zenith, the rim is the horizon, north is up. So
the radius is (90 − elevation), not the elevation — a bird overhead is a
dot in the middle, and a pass that hugs the rim is one that never rises.
Whether it comes over the roof or along the treeline is something no
amount of azimuth and elevation digits conveys, and one glance settles.
The whole pass is drawn: a dashed track with arrowheads for the direction
of travel, a hollow circle where it rises, a filled one where it sets,
and a cross where the satellite is now — green above the horizon, grey
below, because the numbers are still right down there and nothing can be
worked through the earth.
The track is fetched once a minute, not once a second: the SHAPE of a
pass does not change while it happens. Only the marker moves, and that
rides on the tuning poll that was already running.
Headings, because a column of numbers with nothing above it makes an
operator work out what they are looking at every time. A real table, so
the satellite column takes the width the longest name needs — "ZHUHAI-1
OVS-1A" was cut to eight characters in a fixed one.
Colour where it carries meaning, and nowhere else. The maximum elevation
is the quality of the pass, so it is coloured like one: a bird 70°
overhead and one scraping 12° along the horizon are not the same evening,
and the table should say so without the operator reading every number. A
pass in progress is green, one starting within five minutes is amber. And
a dot for the mode: FM and SSB call for a completely different set-up,
and which the next pass is decides whether you reach for a handheld or
for the whole station.
The rotator's baud rate is a dropdown, like every other one in OpsLog.
Three things reported together from the tab.
The shipped frequency plan went from eleven satellites to twenty-five:
the eight Tevel FM cubesats, EO-88, AO-109, CAS-4A and 4B, TO-108,
GreenCube's single-frequency digipeater, and QO-100's wideband
transponder beside its narrowband one. It remains a starting point in a
file the operator can correct — a transponder gets switched and no
release should be needed to follow it — and the picker still lists every
bird in the element set when the "with a plan" filter is unticked.
The readout column drags to any width between 240 and 720 pixels,
double-clicks back to its default, and folds away entirely. How much map
against how much detail is the operator's call: watching a footprint
cross an ocean and working a pass want opposite things.
And the locator is no longer asked for twice. Passes are predicted from
the station locator, which is set once in Station information; the field
here was only ever for an antenna at another site, so it says so and sits
folded away. Nobody should have to wonder which of two locators is in
use.
Also: "Driven by" is two columns wide. "OpsLog (EasyComm II)" did not fit
in a third of the row, and a truncated choice is a choice that cannot be
read.
The world map and the grid-square map shared a single key, so picking
satellite imagery to look at grids repainted the main map too, and there
was no way to have terrain on one and streets on the other. They are
different maps answering different questions, and the imagery that suits
one is not the imagery that suits the next.
Four keys now, one per map, in lib/mapBase beside the remembered views —
named in one place so a rename cannot silently orphan somebody's choice —
and portable, so a copied data folder brings them along. The grid map
inherits whatever was set under the old shared key rather than being
reset to the default: an operator who chose imagery there keeps it.
It handles azimuth and elevation, and a great many stations already run
it in front of a controller OpsLog has never heard of. For those,
OpsLog talking to the controller itself would be a second program
fighting PstRotator over the same cable — so it hands over the bearing
instead, and lets PstRotator turn the mast.
Both kinds sit behind one small interface, chosen in Settings. Neither is
more correct than the other: the right one is whichever the station
already has working.
The 450° overlap is deliberately NOT applied on the PstRotator path.
PstRotator knows which machine is on the other end and does its own; two
programs each deciding to go the long way round is exactly how an antenna
unwinds in the middle of a pass.
Position queries are asked at most every three seconds rather than on
every tick. A PstRotator query binds a socket and waits up to a second
and a half, and many setups answer nothing at all — so one silence is
enough and it stops asking, reporting the commanded position instead and
saying that is what it is.
Settings ▸ Lists ▸ Satellites is gone. It was a text box an operator
typed their birds into by hand, and it had nothing to do with the
satellites the tracker knew: the same station kept two lists of the same
satellites and they drifted apart. The SAT_NAME box on the entry form now
offers the followed set — or every satellite with a frequency plan when
none is followed — merged with whatever that old list still holds, read
and never written, because what it holds is somebody's past work.
And the satellite section moved out of Hardware, which it never was.
Which birds you chase, where your antenna stands and how old your
elements are is operating; the rotator inside it is the only hardware
there, and one block does not make a section a device.
Two things belong in different places, and they were in one.
Settings → Satellites now holds the setup: which satellites to follow —
the same two-column shape as the awards, for the same reason, since a
feed carries two hundred birds and an operator works six — and the
orbital elements, their age, the fetch, and pasting your own. Following
none still means every satellite with both elements and a frequency plan,
so somebody who has not chosen yet is not handed an empty tab.
The panel keeps only what a pass needs. A countdown to AOS, or to LOS
once it is up, because that is the number that decides whether you sit
down; a bar for where in the pass you are, since mid-pass the useful
question is not the clock but whether you are past the peak; rise, peak
and set with compass directions, because "rises SW" is a direction to
look in and 213° is arithmetic. Distance, altitude and footprint. And
approaching or receding, which is the sign of the whole Doppler
correction and the only thing that explains why the frequencies are
moving the way they are.
The countdowns run in the browser from two timestamps. Predicting a pass
steps the orbit across a day thirty seconds at a time, which is not
something to do once a second for a clock the page can keep itself.
EasyComm is what satellite rotator controllers agreed on, so a box that
works with SatPC32, Gpredict or Hamlib works here. Serial or TCP, and its
own settings rather than the HF rotator's: an az/el pair is a different
machine on a different port, and an operator who has both must not have
to choose.
A great many EasyComm controllers — the Arduino trackers above all —
accept commands and never say a word back. That is legal and common, so a
silent controller is not treated as a broken one: it is still driven, and
the last commanded position is reported in its place, marked as commanded
rather than read. A stuck rotator must not be able to hide behind an
order it never carried out, which is why the panel shows the antenna's
position beside the satellite's.
The 450° overlap is the reason a satellite rotator is worth having, so it
is used: a pass crossing north continues past 360 instead of unwinding
three quarters of a turn with the antenna sweeping the ground. Below the
configured elevation the mast is left alone — the numbers are right all
the way round the orbit, but a rotator that chases a satellite through
the far side of the earth spends the night turning, and a mast has a
finite number of turns in it.
The hard part of satellite tuning is not the arithmetic, it is deciding
who owns the dial. A tracker that forces both frequencies fights the
operator every time they turn the knob to follow a station across a
linear transponder; one that never touches the receiver leaves them
chasing a signal that slides nine kilohertz across a 70 cm pass.
So the operator owns the receiver and the tracker follows them. Every
second it asks the radio where the receiver actually is. Where it put it,
nothing has changed. Further than a dial-turn's tolerance, and the
operator has chosen a station: what they landed on is converted back into
a nominal frequency, and the transmitter is derived from that. Which is
the division of labour on a linear bird — the operator listens, the radio
does the sums.
Three ways to reach the radio, because a satellite pair is a shape of
operating rather than a manufacturer's feature. An IC-9700 or IC-9100 is
asked for its OWN satellite mode: it pairs main and sub, gives full
duplex, and keeps the dials linked the way its designers meant, which is
always better than an imitation built out of split. A Flex gets two
slices, A the downlink and B the uplink, created when missing, because
"slice B does not exist" is not something to make an operator fix at the
start of a ten-minute pass. Everything else gets the downlink, and is
told so — half the job announced beats half the job hidden.
What goes in the log is the NOMINAL pair. Two stations working each other
through a transponder read different numbers off their dials at the same
instant; the only figure they can both agree on is the transponder's own.
FREQ is the uplink and FREQ_RX the downlink — the one place a satellite
QSO differs from every other kind, and the reason FREQ alone cannot
describe one.
Three questions answered at once, because on a pass there is no time to
go looking for any of them: where the bird is, when the next one comes,
and what to tune. The map draws each satellite's footprint — the honest
answer to "can I hear it", since everything inside the circle has the
satellite above its horizon — and the selected one's path over the
ground. The pass list is every favourite in time order, the one in
progress in green.
The readout shows the corrected frequency large and the nominal one
beneath it. Only one of them, and an operator cannot tell a Doppler
correction from a mistuned transponder.
The map opens on the station rather than the Atlantic, and remembers
where it was left like the others. The panel is mounted only while its
tab is visible: it asks for the tuning once a second, and there is no
reason to compute an orbit nobody is looking at.
His log settles the 28.074 case: "SetCATFrequency 28.074 MHz" and the
state still reads mode=USB — nothing sent a mode, so the rig simply
stayed where it was. A spot click has always carried one; a frequency
typed by hand carried none. It now uses the same table and the same
tolerance as a spot (±3 kHz of a known FT8/FT4/JS8 frequency), and only
towards the digital modes: tuning AWAY from one leaves the mode alone,
because there the frequency says nothing about what the operator means.
RTTY on Yaesu is a choice the log cannot make: ADIF records "RTTY" and
the rig has MD06 (RTTY-L) and MD09 (RTTY-U). The older lower sideband
stays the default and a station whose FSK controller wants the upper one
says so once in Settings → CAT.
The main hint named three fixed colours, which stopped being true the
moment the operator could choose them. And the paragraph under "Mark
stations already worked" explained a trade-off nobody reads standing at
the radio; the switch says what it does.
The transmit gag starts when the move is commanded; the indicator waited
for a status poll to say the elements were travelling, so the two
disagreed by a second or more — and on an automatic follow (band change
with tracking on) there was no sign at all until a poll landed. The
backend now announces the order as it goes out, the interface shows it at
once and re-reads the antenna immediately, and the real status takes over
the moment it arrives.
The WSJT-X "grey out stations already worked" switch is renamed "Mark
stations already worked": with the colour now chosen by the operator the
old name described the wrong thing, but the switch still answers a
question the palette cannot — WHETHER dupes should be marked at all. On a
well-filled log they are most of a period, and a window where nearly
every line is coloured has stopped saying anything.
The motorised antenna gagged the transmitter for a second or two after it
had finished moving. Three delays were stacked: the antenna polled every
two seconds, the gag held for three after the command whatever the
antenna said, and the widget refreshed every three. The antenna is now
asked four times a second WHILE IT MOVES — an idle one has nothing to say
and stays at two seconds — the gag only bridges the command itself
(900 ms), and the widget follows at half a second while moving.
WSJT-X highlighting:
- A watch-list station already worked on this band and mode is no longer
painted as one to call. The list is a statement of intent, not of what
is left to do, and its pink outranked every other verdict including the
log's, so a worked station stayed pink for the session with nothing to
tell it from one still needed.
- The four colours are the operator's to choose (Settings → UDP). Only
the background: the text colour is derived by luma, so a dark blue
cannot come back as black-on-black in somebody else's window. Changing
one clears the installed highlights, or the de-duplication would keep
showing yesterday's colour until a callsign changed verdict.
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.
The world map was the only one that remembered anything. Panning and
zooming a map is the operator saying which part of the world they work,
and on the FT decodes map and the grid-square map that was thrown away on
every tab switch. Both now keep centre and zoom, through one shared
helper (lib/mapView) that the world map uses too, and the keys are
portable so a copied data folder brings the views with it.
The world map also waits for the station's square before it paints. It
drew the world at 0 degrees and then moved to the operator's longitude —
a screenful of Esri tiles fetched and discarded on every first run. It is
now built once, knowing where it is looking; a profile with no locator
gets the default view after two seconds rather than a blank panel.
An operator with a callsign in the field, switching FT8 to SSB, kept
"+00" as the report. The edited flag protects a report the operator
chose — 57 rather than 59 — and it was holding across a change of mode as
well, where it protects nothing: a decibel figure is not a weak SSB
report, it is not a report at all. Worse, anything that fills the field
from the rig sets that flag too (the S-meter readouts in the rig
consoles), so the field could be stuck in the wrong notation for the rest
of the QSO.
The flag now holds only while the report still belongs to the mode's
family. When it does not, the operator's own judgement is carried across
where it can be — 57 becomes 579, 599 becomes 59 — and the mode's preset
answers where it cannot.
Below 59+20 comes 59+15, then +10, +5, then a plain 59 and down through
58, 57. Stepping the S digit and leaving the suffix where it was turned
59+20 into 58+20, which nobody has ever said on the air. Five decibels at
a time above S9 — the same increment sMeterRST rounds an S-meter reading
to — and one S-unit below it.
The mouse wheel steps the RST fields — one S-unit on an RST or RS, one
decibel on a digital report, up for a better one — in the entry strip and
in the QSO editor. The dropdown beside them lists the reports worth
having to hand, not all 41 decibels, so the wheel works on the value
rather than walking the list. The listener is native and non-passive:
React attaches onWheel passively, where preventDefault does nothing and
the panel scrolls away under the field being adjusted.
PSK Reporter, whole-band scope: clicking a decode reset the report count
to zero. The window there is the BAND's — every FTx report on it,
filtered by target only when the analysis is drawn — and it was emptied
on every target change, throwing away an hour of evidence at the moment
the operator asked the question it answers. The narrow scope still clears
it: there the window is one station's, and keeping it would answer the
new question with the old station's evidence.
Three field reports.
Icom CI-V address 00 could not be kept: zero was read as "not
configured" in all three places that validate it, so every save put the
rig back to the IC-7610's 0x98 — and the model dropdown followed, since
it is derived from the address rather than stored. Picking "Other
(custom address)" also had no effect of its own: the list re-derived
itself and snapped back to whatever rig matched. It now stays chosen.
Cloudlog/Wavelog showed "17m/17m" on ordinary FT8 contacts (OE6CLD).
Every QSO is stamped with a receive side equal to the transmit side, and
the uploaded record carried it; Wavelog draws band/band_rx whenever both
are there. In ADIF an absent BAND_RX means "same as transmit", so the
uploaded record now writes the receive side only when it differs. The
copy forwarded to another logger over UDP keeps writing it in full —
that is why it was stamped in the first place (Log4OM reads BAND_RX) —
through its own ForwardRecordADIF.
"S/F" in a spot comment joins superfox / sfox / F-H as FT8.
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.
Decodes:
- one click SELECTS, two transmit. A single click handed the decode
straight to WSJT-X as a reply, so brushing a row while reading the
band started calling a station.
- the list empties for a receiver that changes band, and a receiver
column appears when more than one is feeding one merged list.
- the period clock turns red while transmitting: it is the one thing on
the screen that moves, so it is where the eye already is.
- a WL badge, after the LoTW "L" — one letter, always in the same
place, so the column does not shift from row to row.
- the auto-call switch, its target and its count, and the chase list:
naming the station you are waiting for is done while watching the
band, not in a settings tree.
Themes: DXHunter's slate with its own blue, and the same slate with
OpsLog's orange. Counted across its sources rather than guessed from
one panel — blue is 132 uses to violet's 25, and the violet is the PSK
Reporter panel alone.
Watchlist: drawn as DXHunter draws it — the callsign in the interface
font rather than monospaced, which is the difference that shows with
the two windows side by side.
FT Map: arcs no longer run off the side of the map. The map shows one
world, and a path crossing the antimeridian was drawn past 180° into
the blank space beside it — from VK that is most of them.
Cluster: "superfox", "fox/hound" and "F/H" in a comment are read as
FT8. They are WSJT-X's DXpedition transmit modes, and the comment fell
through to the band plan and came out DATA — which then decided the
band+mode verdict.
A decoder is named by what it IS: Nexus sends its packets as "Tempo",
the engine inside it, and OpsLog showed a program nobody has heard of.
HAMLOG.online no longer issues API keys, and its upload API takes
nothing else. An operator without a key cannot obtain one, so the
auto-upload switch, the on-close sweep and the 'Send to' entry were all
arming something that could only fail — silently, once per QSO.
Closed at the source rather than hidden in the UI: the upload returns a
sentinel that says why, the manager stops routing to it and says so once
a session, and the manual path refuses with the same words. The settings
page states it plainly instead of showing a switch that does nothing.
Nothing else goes. Their confirmations arrive as an ADIF FILE and never
needed a key, so that import stays; the sent/received state already in
operators' logs stays readable, filterable and bulk-editable; and the
upload itself is kept whole as uploadHamlogLive, still covered by its
request-shape tests, against the day keys come back.
A list in Appearance, in the row's own order, dragged to rearrange —
with QSO entry and the F1-F5 panel at its head, locked. They are not in
that row at all, and letting an operator push the thing they type into
behind a rotator dial is not a preference, it is a trap.
Implemented with flexbox ORDER rather than by moving the JSX: in a
component this size, reordering the tree would have moved every
condition, ref and hook with it. Each slot keeps its place in the source
and receives an order property, so a widget switched off still holds its
rank and returns where the operator left it.
An unknown key from a later version joins the end rather than the front,
and a key that no longer exists is dropped — an old preference can
neither reorder a widget it has never heard of nor hide one. Opens
0.27.10.
Only Kenwood implements it — TX1 is that family's second transmit
command — and every other backend keys the one way it knows. A checkbox
offered to all of them would change nothing on most, which is the same
dead furniture as ANT2 on a radio with one socket. Gated on the Kenwood
backend, and the label says so.
From a TS-590SG report: the voice keyer played through the rig's USB
codec and the radio transmitted silence. Its manual says why — 'TX P1,
0: SEND (normal transmission using the MIC input), 1: DATA SEND
(ACC2/USB input)' — and OpsLog only ever sent the bare TX, so the radio
dutifully opened a front microphone nobody was speaking into.
An option on the audio page, shown for CAT keying, says where the
keyer's audio actually arrives; the manager routes it to a backend that
draws the distinction and falls back to the ordinary key for every rig
where one PTT is all there is. Test PTT goes down the same path, so it
tests what will happen rather than something adjacent.
A decoding application that loses its CAT link keeps announcing the last
dial frequency it knew, and every decode after that carries a stale
band. Nothing downstream can tell: the entity verdicts, the band filter
and the FT map all believe it. Seen for real — MSHV kept saying 80 m,
and Korea read as a NEW BAND because on 80 m it would have been.
Said, not decided. Taking the rig's band instead would be wrong for
anyone decoding a second receiver on another band, and a warning costs
that setup nothing but a line to read past. Shown only while CAT is
actually connected: an empty band means there is nothing to compare
with, never that the rig is on no band. Opens 0.27.9.
One row per digital mode would be the honest layout, and there is no
height for it: the matrix sits in a fixed panel beside a dozen widgets.
So the row keeps its place and changes what it answers — DIG, then each
digital mode the operator's own list holds, in the order they put them
in, then back to DIG.
It costs no round trip. The query behind the matrix already grouped by
band AND mode; only the collapse to a class threw that away, so the same
cell is now published under the raw mode name too. Digital only: PH and
CW have nothing to cycle through.
On a specific mode the you-are-here mark follows THAT mode, or every FT4
entry would light whichever digital row the rotation happened to rest
on. A four-letter mode drops to 9px rather than widen a column sized for
three characters and push the whole matrix sideways. Opens 0.27.8.
The chase switches were born on the DX Cluster page because the cluster
was the only thing that drew their badges. They now decide what the FT
decode list and Chase new say as well, and settings that govern three
screens should not live under the name of one of them. They move to a
DXHunter page — named for what it is about, and for what is meant to
land beside it as more of DXHunter's ideas are ported over.
US states join the switchable markers, gated the same way as POTA,
counties, prefixes and squares: badge, filter chip and display marker,
all from the one chaseAllows question.
Chase POTA, US counties, prefixes and grids were written for the cluster
and stayed there, so an operator who does not chase parks still met NEW
POTA in the FT decode list and in Chase new: the same badge withdrawn on
one screen and shouting on the next. The setting is about what is hunted.
One helper answers the question for every panel, keyed by both the status
field names and the shorter category names so a single call serves badges
and filter chips alike. Chase new also stops CATEGORISING a row by a
marker that is switched off, which had left rows listed with no visible
reason for being there. A new US state has no switch of its own, so it is
always allowed.
A soundcard mode is USB with audio in the mic path, and that is what
most rigs need. Asking for the mode by NAME is the better answer on a
modern transceiver with a DATA position and the wrong one on an older
set, where the CAT layer resolves 'digital' to RTTY/FSK — OmniRig does
exactly that, per rig file, and there is no arguing with it from here.
The operator clicking an FT8 spot landed in FSK, which keys from a
mark/space generator and cannot pass FT8 at all.
Applied in SetCATMode, the one funnel every backend and every caller
goes through, so it holds for a spot click, the band map and the mode
selector alike. The QSO is still logged as FT8: this is what the radio
is put in, not what the contact was.
Band and frequency have to agree — the log, every award and every upload
are read on the BAND — and an operator fixing a wrong frequency is not
also expecting to fix the band by hand. That is exactly how a QSO ends
up filed on 20m at 7 MHz. Both sides follow, TX and RX.
Only when the number lands in a known allocation, because half a
frequency is typed on the way to all of it and a band must never be
blanked by that. bandForMHz moves out of App.tsx into lib/bandplan,
where the two callers can share one answer instead of drifting.
HAMLOG.online was wired into all three when it arrived; HamQTH shipped
with only its uploader and its editor row, so the log could not be asked
'which contacts have never gone there' — the question that precedes
every backlog upload — and a log uploaded to HamQTH by hand could not be
marked, leaving OpsLog offering to send every one of those contacts
again. Sent side only, both whitelists, both panels, two hidden-by-
default columns.
The per-QSO API is the only correct way to send a SELECTION, and at the
pace it must be driven a 14k backlog costs the better part of an hour.
HamQTH's other endpoint takes a whole log as one file — and REPLACES
what is on the site with it: its documentation says plainly that partial
uploads do not exist. So it is offered as its own deliberate act behind
a confirmation, never as the batch path behind 'send these', where it
would delete every QSO the operator had not selected.
Scoped to the callsign this profile uploads as, so a database holding
two operators' contacts cannot push one into the other's log; tar.gz
above 12 MB because the ceiling is 20 and a six-figure log passes it as
text; and every QSO not already stamped is marked sent afterwards, in
bulk, so the backlog list agrees with reality.
The colour already said connected; the word beside it said it again, in
the widest part of a row that has to hold five servers. It goes, and the
pills earn the job nothing else in the app had: reaching ONE cluster
without opening Settings. Click connects or drops that session — a
connecting one included, so a server retrying into a dead host can be
stopped. State, retry count, address and last error move into the
tooltip, where they cost no width.
ctrl+wheel is the WINDOW zoom everywhere else in OpsLog, and one gesture
that resizes the whole app over one panel and one band map over another
is a gesture nobody can trust. The + and - buttons keep the zoom, and
the footer hint stops advertising what is gone.
The DX-World headlines now carry a chase badge like the announcements —
but ENTITY-LEVEL only. A headline names no band, and asking the slot
question without one answers 'new band' for every entity ever worked:
the one mistake that costs a QSO. So the news says NEW DXCC or worked,
and the sharper verdicts stay where the bands and modes are known.
rouggyandClaude Opus 5