Three faults an operator's log finally made visible, plus the interface
work that came out of the same session.
Reliability:
- UDP events were dropped on backpressure without a word. A period hands
over twenty-odd decodes at once, and one slow write to the radio was
enough to fill the queue — so a decode simply never appeared, and the
only detector was the operator comparing the panel with JTDX. The drop
is now counted and logged, panadapter spots went to their own goroutine
so the radio can no longer hold the decode stream up, and the queue is
deep enough for a full period.
- The CAT manager waited for its poll loop with a bare <-done. A loop
wedged in a serial read then blocked every later restart inside Start,
before it could even try to connect: the rig stayed dead, no line was
written anywhere, and only killing the process recovered it. The wait
is bounded at ten seconds and says what it abandoned and why the next
connect may fail.
- Shutdown had no logging at all, so a hang left nothing to go on and a
process the operator had to kill — which then blocked the restart after
an update. Every step is logged, and a watchdog forces the exit if one
of them never returns.
Auto-call:
- A QSO in progress is now held by OpsLog itself rather than inferred
from the sender's Status. The moment WSJT-X/JTDX dropped the DX call or
the Enable-Tx flag between overs, the exchange looked finished and the
next CQ was answered, interleaving two and then three QSOs on one
slice. Released on log, on halt, on taking over, and by a watchdog.
Cluster console:
- Replies to a command were buried under the spot flood; a Replies
toggle hides the DX spots, which the list above already shows.
- Twelve named command buttons beside the input, configured in
Settings -> Cluster; a button with no command is not drawn.
- Following the tail is now an explicit switch, and sending a command
re-arms it. It used to measure "am I at the bottom" AFTER committing
the new lines, so a ten-line reply looked like the operator had
scrolled up and was never followed — the one case it exists for.
Awards:
- An award can name NO field. The matching controls disappear with it
and only hand-assigned references count, which is the only thing that
can feed a reference like WWBOTA. A test pins that nothing else is
scanned.
- WWBOTA added to the catalogue with its 31 342 references.
Elsewhere: the rotor widget's Stop button acknowledges the press like
the direction presets already did, and the docked band map can be
switched to fit-to-band from its own header.
They were made session-only on a misreading: the ask was about the FIRST launch
of a fresh install, not every launch. Restored as they were — restored on
reopen, and travelling with a copied data/ folder.
A first-ever launch already starts with nothing filtered: every selection
defaults to empty or off and there is no code that switches one on. The one
route by which a new installation can come up filtered is a copied data/ folder,
which carries the previous machine's selections by design.
The filtered-out message and the clear-every-filter button stay: they are what
makes a filter that IS set visible, whenever it was set.
buildDeviceDriver had no case for "httpgen", so the generic board fell through
to the WebSwitch driver: it polled an address it had never been given, reported
itself offline, greyed out every relay button, and sent none of the configured
URLs. Nothing in the interface said so — the board was configured, saved and
listed, and simply did nothing. deviceKey did not cover the URLs either, so once
that is fixed, correcting a typo in one would still have handed back the cached
driver holding the old address until a restart.
Two shapes of home-made switch could not be described at all:
- a bit-mask board whose four URLs differ by one character
(/Set0/1, /Set0/2, /Set0/4, /Set0/8) — {value} in the pattern now takes the
number from the per-relay box, keeping the address in one place;
- a board numbering its channels from zero — {relay-1}, since giving up the
pattern for eight hand-typed URLs was the only alternative.
The pattern decides what the per-relay boxes hold, and the grid says which as
soon as {value} is typed: guessing per box ("does this look like a URL?") would
change meaning on a typo, which is not a thing to do to something wired to an
antenna. A URL typed without a scheme gets http:// like the named boards get
from relayBase; https:// is passed through untouched.
Host and the connection test are gone for this type. It has no address of its
own — its relays may each live on a different box — and no status to read, so a
test could only ever answer "OK, 4 relays". Save was greyed out without a host,
which made a complete configuration of four full URLs impossible to store.
Cluster filters no longer persist across launches. A band lock set weeks earlier
is invisible to whoever set it: the counter reads 76 spots live, the grid is
empty, and the search goes to the cluster instead. Nobody loses work by
re-ticking a chip. Grouping and the panel state still persist — they change how
spots look, never whether they appear.
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.
Two options that change what the eye is pulled towards, both applying to the
cluster list AND the band map.
Mute worked before: a spot that brings nothing new loses its colour and its
badges. It stays in the list - the operator asked for less noise, not less
information. "Brings nothing new" reuses the dimming rule the cluster list
already had rather than inventing a second notion of done, so it keeps obeying
the same-slot option and the digital-mode grouping for free. A new-band or
new-slot status is NOT muted: having worked that callsign once on another band
says nothing about the band in front of you.
Highlight unworked in this slot: colours any callsign not yet worked on this
band and this mode, whatever the entity says. For an operator filling slots a
common entity on a fresh band+mode is the whole point, and the entity-level
status flatly calls it worked. It reuses the existing new-slot status, so no new
colour, no new legend, no new badge - both panels already knew how to draw it.
WorkedSlot is computed independently of the same-slot preference: it is what
this option reads, and it must not change meaning because a different option was
toggled. The slot index is now built when either option needs it, and the status
cache is keyed on both so a toggle invalidates it.
The rules live in one module used by both panels. Marker colours already taught
us what happens when the two derive the same thing separately.
Both band maps were pinned to a hardcoded width — 300px docked beside the
tables, 260px per card in the Band map tab. On a busy band the map could not be
given more room, and on a quiet one the log could not take it back.
The docked map becomes a resizable grid column with the grip in the gap between
the panes, so the handle costs no space; the tab cards share one width with the
grip on their right edge. Side-by-side columns of different widths read as a
mistake rather than a choice, which is why the tab has one width and not one
per card. Double-click either grip to return to the default.
The drag measures from the pointer's START position rather than the container,
so the same helper serves both edges — the docked map sits on the left or the
right depending on the operator's setting, and the grip is on its inner edge
either way. Pointer capture, like the main splitter: without it the map or the
grid under the cursor swallows the moves.
Both widths are persisted through writeUiPref and registered as portable, so
they travel with the data folder like the main splitter and the rest of the
layout.
The Main tab was a fixed 50/50 grid, but a map and a cluster list want
very different widths and which one deserves the room changes with what
the operator is doing.
The share is clamped to 15..85: a pane can be made small but never
dragged out of existence, because recovering from that would mean
grabbing a divider no longer on screen. Double-click restores even.
The drag uses pointer capture on the divider — without it Leaflet
swallows the moves as soon as the cursor crosses the map. Persisted
through writeUiPref, so it travels with data/ like the other UI prefs.
The backend honours the setting: it normalises the log side and the spot's own
mode through the same grouper, so an FT4 spot on a band worked in FT8 reads as
worked. That was not the fault.
Spot statuses are cached per call+band+mode and the cache never expired. Ticking
the box in Settings therefore changed nothing on screen — every spot already
listed kept the answer to the old question, and only new arrivals were judged by
the new rule. The cache is now dropped when settings are saved.
Also: writeUiPref swallowed a failed database write. The interface kept working
from localStorage while the BACKEND — which reads some of these keys, this one
among them — still saw the old value. The two disagreeing in silence is exactly
the shape of this bug, so the failure is now logged.
Settings → General, beside the language. An operator reading 2026-07-30 as the
7th of the 30th month is reading their own log wrongly, and that is a display
problem.
Storage stays ISO/ADIF, deliberately and permanently: it is what ADIF
specifies, it sorts correctly as text, and a stored format that followed a UI
preference would make the log unreadable the day the preference changed. Exports
and uploads are untouched.
Two details that decide whether it actually works:
- The columns are rebuilt when the format changes. The formatters are captured
inside AG-Grid's column definitions, so nothing else would notice and the
table would keep the old format until something forced a rebuild.
- main.tsx re-reads the choice after the portable prefs are pulled from the
database. The module reads localStorage at import time, which is BEFORE that
sync — so a copied data/ folder would have shown ISO until the next launch.
UTC is not part of the choice and never will be: a logbook is kept in UTC, and
showing local time would make the display disagree with the QSO's own record
twice a year.
The sort choice is now written through writeUiPref and both keys are registered
as portable, so they travel with a copied data/ folder like every other UI
preference.
Registering them is the part that matters: writeUiPref stores to the DB, but
only keys on the portable list are read BACK at startup. A key written and never
restored looks exactly like one that was never saved — which is what would have
happened here.
The grey-line toggle had the same gap. It called writeUiPref from the day it was
written but was never added to the list, so it came back off on the next launch.
Found while adding the award keys beside it.
Award refs are now computed once and stored on the QSO as a JSON column
(award_refs, e.g. {"DDFM":"74","WAJA":"12"}) instead of recomputing the whole
award engine on every grid page load. Written on log/edit/UDP-import and
bulk-recomputed when an award definition or reference list changes; a one-time
per-logbook backfill materializes pre-existing QSOs. The grid reads the column
directly like any other field, so it's fast and available everywhere (including
the shared MySQL logbook).
Also fix per-profile grid column layout: the DB copy was already per-profile,
but the localStorage cache used one global namespace and shadowed it, so a
profile switch kept the previous profile's columns/widths. gridPrefs now scopes
the cache by active profile id and the grids remount on profile:changed.
Opt-in via Settings→General (portable pref opslog.showQsoRate). Shows the
contest-style QSO rate in QSOs/hour, projected from the trailing 10-minute
(count ×6) and 60-minute windows, between the widget icons and propagation.
Backend: qso.RecentRate counts QSOs whose start time falls in each trailing
window, scanning only the last 400 rows (cheap on a large log); App.GetQSORate
exposes the 10/60-min counts. Frontend refreshes on qso:logged and a 30s tick.
The meter shares the propagation grid cell — the header is a fixed 6-column
grid, so adding it as its own child pushed profile/band-map/compact onto a
second row. i18n EN + FR.
rouggy