An operator who does not chase parks does not want NEW POTA shouting from every
activator spot. Two switches (Settings → DX Cluster, on by default): off, the
marker is withdrawn at the display layer — applySpotDisplay, the same chokepoint
the grid, the band map and the filter read through — so the badge, the colour,
the filter chip and the reference column all go quiet together, and a new-band +
new-POTA spot reads NEW BAND alone. The facts keep being computed; only the
telling stops, so ticking the box back on needs no rescan.
Per review: the digital-grouping sentence on the same-slot option, the
spot-lifetime explanation, the ring-buffer paragraph on the spots-kept field,
and the free-public-nodes line all go.
The report: switching the K3 to a data mode 'does not work for FT8 — the K3
does not go into DATA'. The mode digit is only half the answer on that radio:
MD6 keeps whatever DT submode the previous session left, and with FSK D still
armed the rig keys FT8 with no rear-audio modulation.
The panel buttons say the whole thing: DATA is MD6+DT0 (DATA A, the soundcard
path), DATA RTTY is MD6+DT2 (FSK D). The DT submode is also read on the
settings beat — Elecraft only, a plain Kenwood would '?;' it — so the active
DATA button follows what the rig is actually in, front-panel changes included.
A dedicated SetKenwoodPanelMode rather than the logger's SetMode: a panel
button is the operator saying exactly what the rig should do, not an ADIF mode
to be mapped through preferences.
Three from review. Aqua for NEW SLOT sat right next to the POTA green — it is
now the sky cyan the panadapter palette has shipped for new-slot all along.
The NEW COUNTY chip was green while its badge is violet, and NEW SLOT's chip
was still caution yellow: chips now carry the badge's own colour (color-mix for
the muted border/背景), because a filter that does not look like what it selects
has to be learned twice.
And the NEW CALL chip matched only the DISPLAYED status, which is manufactured
by the slot-highlight option — with that option off the chip matched nothing
and read as broken. It now filters on the fact itself (worked_slot false), so
it works either way.
The whole new-* family shared the warning amber while the NEW PFX marker sits in
caution yellow — two different facts, two near-identical colours in one cell.
NEW SLOT now takes aqua (chart-2), the same story the panadapter palette already
tells: its default for new-slot has been cyan all along.
The Send-spot dialog took catState.freq_hz, which is the TX frequency. Working
a DXpedition split, that is where WE transmit: the spot went out five up from
the DX, pointing the whole cluster at the pile-up instead of the station. The
RX frequency is where we listen — where the DX is — and is what a spot names.
Two rounds of fixes and the SunSDR's meters are still silent. The one remaining
difference from the protocol document is the case: its examples read
TX_SENSORS_ENABLE:true,200; and ours went out lower-case. Every other command
works lower-case, but nothing proves this newer path does — a case-insensitive
server ignores the duplicate, a sensitive one finally hears it.
The report from a real SunSDR: transmit power and SWR still empty after the
sensors fix. The subscription went out once, at connect — while ExpertSDR3 is
still streaming its initial state dump, exactly where a unidirectional control
command can be ignored. It is now renewed every time the server says 'ready'.
The sensor messages also join the logged-on-arrival set, capped like the rest:
the next log will say whether TX_SENSORS ever arrives, which is the question —
a radio that never sends it (AetherSDR may not) and a frame that arrived and
was dropped leave the same blank meters and need opposite fixes.
Per review: the panel-wide 'saved instantly' hint goes; the date-format picker
loses its embedded sample line (kept as the buttons' tooltip) so the row is one
line tall; the IARU region moves up under the date format, before the themes;
and the parentheticals after Distances-in-miles, Check-updates and the
telemetry opt-out go. The telemetry and ClubLog explanations survive as
tooltips — an opt-out about data leaving the machine, and an option changing
how entities resolve, should still say what they do somewhere.
The band maps carried one hard-coded table — Region 1's — so a US operator's
40 m stopped at 7200 with stations spotted at 7250 hanging past the top of the
map, and the SSB wash started 25 kHz early. The region is a station-level fact
stated once (Settings → General, portable pref); lib/bandplan owns the three
tables and publishes changes to the open maps the way the distance unit reaches
the grids.
The tables stay deliberately coarse: a band map's wash is context, not a
regulatory chart, so only the differences an operator notices are split out —
Region 2's 80 m to 4000 and 40 m to 7300 (phone from 7125), Region 3's 80 m to
3900, the wider VHF/UHF allocations. National fine print does not belong in a
background tint.
The feature needs more rounds than the next release can wait for, so main goes
back to before it: the packages, bindings, migration, UI and i18n all move to
the feature/labels branch, which holds every commit. The 0.26.23 block keeps
only the Station column.
The 0031 migration may already have run on a machine that launched a dev build;
the two label tables it created are inert and the recorded migration row is
harmless — the runner only applies filenames it has, so re-adding the migration
when the branch merges will skip cleanly there and apply everywhere else.
Three corrections from the first real session. Routed via a manager, the box
was prefilled with the DX's own address — the one thing that must not go on
that envelope. It now starts empty and the QRZ fetch fills in the MANAGER's;
switching the routing recomputes the box unless the operator has typed in it,
because a hand-checked address is not the app's to replace.
A fetch that came back with no street was overwriting a reviewed address with a
bare country — the cty.dat fallback dressed as an answer. It now refuses to
touch the box and says nothing was found. And the prefill no longer stacks the
same town three times (address + QTH + country all carrying it).
The output is ONE PDF for the whole session, each page at its own label size,
written to the temp dir and opened straight in the viewer — no save dialog: the
file is a print run, not a document to keep.
The printing session in three steps. The worklist is the paper queue (ADIF
qsl_sent R/Q), grouped by callsign since several QSOs of one station share a
card. Each recipient is reviewed before anything prints: routing first — via
manager when qsl_via says so, direct when an address is known, bureau otherwise
— then the address itself, editable and fetchable from QRZ (the MANAGER's
address when routing says via). What is printed is the reviewed text verbatim,
not a re-resolution that could differ from what was checked.
One PDF per label kind, never one file for all: a roll printer holds one stock
at a time, and a file mixing 29 mm addresses with 62 mm QSO labels could not be
printed at all. Pages are rasterised by the designer's own renderer at the
stock's dpi and carried into the PDF untouched — internal/pdf is a hand-written
image-page writer (DeviceGray + flate: monochrome, lossless, no cgo) because
that is the entire need.
Bureau stations get no address label (no envelope); return labels are printed
one per envelope. Finishing offers the log update: QSL_SENT=Y, the chosen date,
via B or D per routing — through the same BulkUpdateQSL the paper view uses.
A fixed 720 px cap cut a 98 mm label off at the RST column and wasted half the
window; the scale now follows the centre pane's measured size, with a floor so
small stock never renders unreadably.
The designer's data model lives in internal/labels: STOCKS are the physical
roll in the printer (geometry in mm, margins, dpi — seeded with the common
Brother DK sizes, the QL family being what prompted the feature), TEMPLATES are
one design each, of two kinds: the QSO label glued on the card, whose repeating
table carries several contacts of the same station, and the address label for
the envelope, whose lines collapse when a variable is empty.
Everything is measured in millimetres — labels are sold in mm, and an operator
lining a design up against a physical sticker thinks in mm; pixels exist only in
the renderer, at the stock's dpi. The canvas renderer is shared between the
editor's preview and the future print path, so there is no second
implementation for the preview to disagree with.
The preview is fed with the log's latest contacts rather than lorem ipsum: real
data shows a too-narrow column immediately.
Printing (PDF, one page per label at exact size) is the next module; nothing
here prints yet.
With 'All my callsigns' the report spans F4BPO, F4BPO/P and TM2Q at once, and a
list mixing them says nothing about which one a confirmation belongs to — which
is the question that option creates.
The column appears only when the rows actually carry a station: the other
services return one, and an empty column for them would be noise.
The grouping keyed on the callsign alone, so every spot of a station outside the
first one's band and mode was dropped from the list. RI1FJL spotted on 17m CW,
20m, 30m, 12m and 15m FT8 showed as a single row: four slots gone from the one
view an operator uses to find them.
A duplicate is the dozen skimmers that all heard the same CQ — same station,
same band, same mode. The same station on another band is the opposite of a
duplicate; it is what the chaser is scanning for.
Expert Electronics' own document gives the command whole:
SPOT:RN6LHF,CW,7100000,16711680,ANY_TEXT;
16711680 is 0x00FF0000 — positive. This backend sent the same field as a SIGNED
32-bit value, from a third-party example: with the alpha byte set to FF for
opacity, 0xFFFFA500 becomes -22336, and a spot whose colour ExpertSDR cannot
read is dropped without a reply or an error.
Reported on ExpertSDR3 1.3, which speaks TCI 2.x — the protocol version was
never the problem, and my first reading of that report was wrong.
The first three spots are now logged verbatim: an ignored spot leaves no trace
whatsoever, so that line is the only evidence of what went out.
TCI meters: the S-meter came only from RX_SMETER and the transmit meters from
TX_POWER / TX_SWR — commands ExpertSDR3 does not send. The protocol's answer is
a subscription (RX_SENSORS_ENABLE / TX_SENSORS_ENABLE, §4.4 of the TCI PDF),
after which the radio pushes RX_CHANNEL_SENSORS and TX_SENSORS. Nobody had
asked, so the console's meters sat empty in RX and in TX while everything else
worked.
Cluster: the held-spot counter looked for the row it froze on. A station spotted
again REPLACES its row, so that row vanishes in the ordinary course of things
and the count fell through to 'everything is new' — 4, 5, then 500. Counted by
timestamp now, which survives both the replacement and the ring buffer.
SMTP: '535 5.7.139 basic authentication is disabled' is a policy, not a typo.
The message now says so, and says what actually helps, without claiming a policy
when the server simply rejected the password.
Every flush commits state the whole window re-renders on, and the window was a
flat 50 ms — twenty full renders a second under an RBN firehose. That is paid
everywhere else in the interface, and it is what a dropdown highlighting its
entries a beat behind the mouse actually is.
The window now follows the rate: 50 ms on a quiet cluster, where a spot should
appear the moment it arrives; 200 ms past five a second; 500 ms past twenty,
where half a second's delay on a line already scrolling past is invisible.
The pane drew its own title bar above the grid's toolbar, so the cluster spent
two lines on headers where Recent QSOs beside it spent one — in a pane often
only a few spots tall. The grid's toolbar now takes what the caller wants on its
left, and the pane passes its title, live count and Filters button there.
Reported by VK4DX.
UploadLoTW returns both a terse error ('no QSOs processed') and a Message
carrying TQSL's own lines — '17 QSO records were already uploaded', 'N QSO
records are out of date range'. The caller took the error whenever there was
one, which is precisely the half that explains nothing: the operator saw a red
line naming a condition with three unrelated causes and no way to tell which.
The sixth CW engine, and the one the TCI backend was left without. A SunSDR
keys from the WebSocket that already carries the CAT: no WinKeyer, no second
serial port, nothing to wire.
CW_MACROS:0,<text>; send
CW_MACROS_SPEED:<wpm>; speed
CW_MACROS_STOP; abort
Confirmed against the TCI command table in ars-ka0s/eesdr-tci — the source that
settled SPOT. CW_MACROS rather than TCI 2.0's CW_MSG: it exists from 1.6, and
OpsLog resolves its own variables, so the before/after callsign fields have
nothing to carry.
Commas and semicolons are stripped before sending. They are the protocol's own
separators: a comma would become another argument, a semicolon would end the
command with the message half keyed and the rest parsed as a command.
Only the MACRO speed is set, not the paddle keyer's — an operator who set their
paddle to 28 wpm did not ask for it to change because a macro went out at 25.
And there is no backspace: TCI can stop a message but cannot un-type one, so the
type-ahead correction the Flex engine offers is absent rather than faked.
Wails saves and restores in two different coordinate systems. WindowGetPosition
returns GetWindowRect — absolute. WindowSetPosition is winc's ControlBase.SetPos,
which adds the CURRENT monitor's work-area origin:
w32.SetWindowPos(hwnd, HWND_TOP, int(info.RcWork.Left)+x, ...)
On the primary monitor that origin is 0 and nothing shows. With a monitor to the
LEFT it compounds: a station with its left screen at x=-3840 saved -3844,
reopened there, had -3840 added, and stored -7684 — then -11524, one screen
further out at every launch, until the window was off the desktop entirely.
So the placement is done here, with SetWindowPos and no offset, falling back to
the toolkit when the handle cannot be found. Compact mode had the same pairing
and is fixed with it.
Clicking a spot sets the frequency, then the mode 150 ms later, and SetMode
chose USB or LSB from t.freqA — the frequency the radio had ECHOED. From 7 MHz
onto a 14 MHz spot that echo has often not landed, so the sideband was computed
for the band being left: LSB on 20 m. Clicking the same spot again, the echo
having arrived, gave USB. Reported from a SunSDR as 'the frequency is right, the
mode is wrong until I click twice'.
SetFrequency now records what was asked for and SetMode prefers it until the
radio's own echo confirms the move.
The server's 'protocol:' announcement is also kept instead of being filed under
unhandled: it names the ExpertSDR and its TCI version, and panorama spots need
TCI 1.5 — older servers accept the spot commands and silently drop them, which
is indistinguishable from a broken logger. Now it says so.
The status comes from spotEntityStatus: it means the country has been worked on
this band and mode. The label said 'Worked (this band + mode already in log)',
which reads as 'I have had this station' — so a spot the cluster called NEW PFX
looked like a contradiction, when the two were answering different questions
about different subjects.
The callsign-level fact has its own marker and its own words ('Callsign already
worked'), so the two are now told apart by reading them.
The strip deliberately shows three markers of five — the pill is 22 px and a
fourth segment makes it a colour code nobody reads. But the tooltip has room and
was filtering them out too, so the same spot read NEW PFX in the cluster and
'Worked (this band + mode already in log)' on the map. Both were true: the
entity is worked on that slot and the WPX prefix never has been. Neither view
said so.
A tester compared LogHX's two download options on the same account: two minutes
for the confirmations, twenty for the confirmations with QSO details. OpsLog was
always sending qso_qsldetail=yes — LogHX's slow option — which is the whole of
the wait people were reporting.
Marking a confirmation needs call, date, band and mode; the detail adds the QSL
date and the station's grid, state and county. Now a choice, off by default, and
forced on when the download is also ADDING the QSOs it cannot find — the one
case where those fields have no other source.
Miles and the LoTW download progress landed after v0.26.20 was tagged, so they
belonged to the next block: an entry appended to a shipped one never reaches the
operators who installed it, and misstates what that version contained. The .20
block is byte-identical to the tag again.
Deferred, it stopped at the end of the function — so 'still waiting for LoTW to
build the report' kept printing between the megabyte lines, saying the opposite
of what was happening.
The progress lines only start once bytes arrive, and on a large account nothing
arrives for minutes — LoTW builds the entire report before sending any of it.
That silence WAS the complaint: the window still just said 'working'.
A heartbeat every fifteen seconds until the headers land, then the HTTP status,
then the megabytes — the first at 256 KB rather than 1 MB, so the very first
sign that it is moving comes early.
Three reports of the same shape: a 503 for anything wider than a few days
before, and since the timeout was raised, a window that sits at 'working'
forever. Both are the same missing thing — nothing said what the transfer was
doing.
The body is now read in chunks and every megabyte is reported. A 503/502/504 is
retried twice, 20 s then 40 s, each attempt announced: LoTW answers 'busy' to a
wide report often enough that other loggers simply ask again. And the deadline
is no longer on the whole exchange, which either cut off a healthy slow download
or hid a dead one for twenty minutes — it is ten minutes to START answering
(LoTW builds the whole report first) and two minutes of silence once it has,
which is the difference between slow and dead.
Everything is computed in kilometres and converted once at display time, in
lib/units — storing miles anywhere would give the same number two sources of
truth and a rounding error that grows with every hop.
The grids capture the unit inside their column definitions, header and formatter
both, so a change is published to them the way the date format already is;
without that a toggle would only appear after a language change or a restart.
The preference is portable, like the other display ones.
Without qso_qslsince LoTW does not answer 'every confirmation' — it answers
with a few recent ones, as a 200 and a valid ADIF. 'All' therefore downloaded a
nearly empty report and said 'matched 1 of 1' on an account holding twelve
thousand. It now asks from 1945-11-15, older than any QSO LoTW accepts.
And the request had two minutes: LoTW spends several of them building a full
account before the first byte, so asking for everything ended in 'context
deadline exceeded while reading body' — a network-shaped message for a
too-short deadline. Twenty minutes, and the read cap raised past the 18 MB such
a report actually weighs.
Unscoped, the report carries every station on the account — including the calls
belonging to another profile's logbook. Those match nothing here, and with 'add
the ones not found' ticked they would pour a second log into this one. The
station callsigns this logbook actually holds are now the filter: a portable
worked here is kept, an expedition call never used here is skipped and counted.
A near-empty report is also the failure that reads as success — 'matched 1 of 1'
where the account holds twelve thousand. Under 4 KB, what LoTW answered is shown
verbatim instead.
The download passes qso_owncall so one profile does not pull another's
confirmations. That scope also hides them: a QSO made as F4BPO/P is confirmed at
LoTW and can never come back to an F4BPO profile, so it stays unconfirmed here
for good while the ARRL counts it — found while reconciling a DXCC account
against the panel, where it was the whole of the CW gap (Jersey, worked as
F4BPO/P).
Off by default: the scope is right for anyone whose profiles are separate
stations.
The filter keeps a REFERENCE for its unconfirmed slots, so its confirmed ones
come along — and green on grey means the answer is the quietest thing in the
row. Faded to a quarter under that filter only, not hidden: which band is
already done is part of deciding which one to chase.
The Challenge line says 1832 worked against 1554 confirmed and stops there —
278 band-slots waiting for a card with nothing pointing at them. Every existing
filter works per REFERENCE, so an entity confirmed on 20 m answers 'confirmed'
and its unconfirmed 15 m contact stays invisible.
The new filter keeps the references holding at least one such slot, and the
count beside the reference total is the gap itself, recomputed over whatever the
other filters left on screen and over the bands actually displayed — so it
always adds up to the columns in front of the operator.
The SOTA feeds put the summit in the spot's own text, so there is nothing to
poll: a regex on the comment gives the reference, and clicking the spot writes
SOTA@<ref> into the award references the way a park already wrote POTA@<ref>.
The regex is narrow on purpose — association/region-NNN, anchored — because
POTA (US-4475), WWFF (DLFF-0001) and portable callsigns (DL/SP9DPM/P) share
that field and none of them is a summit. Pinned by a table test.
Off by default: the reference is only there on the summit feeds, and an empty
column for every operator who does not chase them is worse than a checkbox.
The chip read a.spe ?? a.acom ?? a.pgxl, so a KPA fell through to the
not-connected fallback: red on a working amplifier, and a click that opened the
settings instead of switching to STANDBY. Reported from a KPA500 whose panel
showed band, SWR and temperature at the same time.
The card's offline text also borrowed the Acom's string, so a KPA that dropped
its link announced itself as an Acom.
rouggy