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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The CI-V trace settles it: the IC-7851 answers 27 10 01 with FB and 27 14 00
with its mode, but refuses 27 11 in BOTH shapes — it controls its scope over
CI-V and never streams it. Its last firmware is from 2016, older than the
waveform stream itself; Hamlib's caps claim otherwise, the radio is the
authority.
Rejected both ways is a permanent answer, so it is remembered and reported:
the panadapter says the radio does not send its scope, which is the one thing a
black rectangle could not say.
The dot is drawn over all five cell backgrounds, so it cannot borrow one of
their colours; it defaults to the theme foreground with a background ring and
now takes two overrides of its own, worked and confirmed, alongside the rest of
the matrix palette.
The worked-before cell answered one question with two facts fused into it.
bandStatusCode takes the highest of them, so a confirmed entity outranks a
worked callsign — right for awards, wrong while chasing: a slot worked with the
DXpedition this morning reads "entity confirmed" and says nothing about it.
BandStatus now carries the callsign's own answer alongside the entity's, and the
cell draws a dot for it. The dot is deliberately identical everywhere — same
shape, same colour, over all five backgrounds — so it is read as one thing
rather than as five variants of the colour underneath it.
With one rig, MY_RIG belonged in Operating conditions and nowhere else.
With several, that becomes the wrong place: operating conditions describe
a PLAN — 'on 20 m I use the beam and the 7300' — while the question a
logged QSO asks is which radio was keying.
So each saved radio carries its own MY_RIG, consulted BEFORE the per-band
station. When the two disagree — a second rig borrowed for one evening on
20 m — the one that is transmitting is the true answer.
Left empty it changes nothing at all: the old chain (band default, then
the profile's rig) answers exactly as it did, which is what every
single-radio station will keep doing without touching a setting.
It showed what the radio calls itself over CAT — 'Kenwood (911)' for a K3,
a bare 'CAT' for a Flex that reports nothing useful. That is the answer to
a question nobody asks once the rig has a name in the list, and it made
the two radios look alike in the one place they have to be told apart.
The name the operator typed comes first now, on the chip and in the menu,
and falls back to the radio's own identity when they typed none. The model
identity is still in the tooltip, where it answers 'what is actually
connected' without taking the place of 'which of my rigs is this'.
It only became a menu from two radios, on the reasoning that a single
radio has nothing to switch to. That hides the feature from precisely the
operator who has not made a second radio yet — the click lands on a
settings dialog they did not ask for, which is what happened on the first
try. With one radio the menu now shows that radio and 'Add a radio…'.
Right-click still goes straight to the CAT settings.
The answer to 'I have two rigs' was 'make two profiles', which is a heavy
instrument for a light question: a profile carries the whole station —
logbook, callsign, awards, cluster, macros — so switching one to change
which radio is connected takes all of that with it, including a change of
logbook when the profiles point at different databases.
Radios are a list now, the way amplifiers already are. The CAT chip in the
status bar opens it, one click connects the chosen rig, and nothing else
about the station moves.
The storage keeps the ACTIVE radio in the same settings keys everything
already reads (cat.backend, cat.icom_port, …), and switching writes the
chosen entry into them and reloads the link. So the consoles, the CAT
sharing, the band-follow and every panel see exactly what they saw before
and needed no change at all — the list is a second store beside the
configuration, not a replacement for it.
Details that matter more than they look:
- An operator who has run one rig for a year opens the list and finds it
there, because a missing list reads as the CURRENT settings rather
than as nothing. It is written on the first save, not on the first
read.
- Editing the CAT panel updates the active entry, or an edit made before
switching away would be lost on the way back.
- A new radio starts as a COPY of the current one: a second rig is
usually the same shape with one port changed, and an empty form is a
form to fill in twice.
- Switching saves the panel first, so edits to the radio being left
behind are kept.
- The chip only becomes a menu with more than one radio; with one it
opens the CAT settings exactly as it always did.
It has not shipped yet, so an operator reading about the SunSDR console
should meet what it does — not a list of repairs to a thing they have
never run.
Everything here came from one operator with the radio in front of him, and
most of it was mine to fix. The drive commands need the transceiver index
('drive:0,15;', not 'drive:15;') or the radio ignores them without a word.
The console now holds a click the radio does not echo, so a working button
stops looking dead — and lets go the moment the radio contradicts it, so a
REFUSED setting still tells the truth. Filters per mode, APF only in CW,
levels on wide rows with typed values, the RIT control shared with the
Icom console, the transmit meters, and a TUNE that can be switched off
again.
Two findings worth keeping: this radio re-asserts sql_enable eighty
milliseconds after being told to turn the squelch off, and it never
answers TX_POWER or TX_SWR — both are its own doing, and both are visible
in the log rather than argued about.
Two things from one screenshot, and the second is arithmetic rather than a
bug.
Editing an award refreshed the grid and not the statistics matrix, so
changing which confirmations count left the table showing the old rule's
numbers with nothing to mark them stale. That is how a setting comes to
look as though it does nothing.
And OpsLog's 3229 against LoTW's 3004: the Challenge counts confirmed
band-slots on ten bands, and 60 m is not one of them. 3229 less the 224 in
the 60 m column is 3005. So the number was right and the QUESTION was
different — the panel now answers the Challenge one too, under the table
where the comparison is made.
The two totals also say what they are on hover. 'Total' and 'Général' side
by side tell nobody which counts entities and which counts band-slots, and
3309 read as entities is an impossible number — which is exactly how it
was read.
Two faults with one cause: this radio does not echo 'tune:0,true'.
So the panel never knew a tune was running. The button stayed on TUNE and
every further press sent another START — there was no way to stop it from
here at all. The state is recorded when the command is sent now; whatever
the radio says afterwards still wins, it simply never says anything.
And the transmit meters were asked for only while t.tx, which a tune
carrier does not set: the radio reports tuning as its own state, not as a
transmission. So power and SWR sat at zero for the whole tune — the exact
carrier an operator holds a tune for in order to watch an SWR on. They now
follow PTT or TUNE, and the S-meter reads '—' under our own carrier
either way.
TX_POWER and TX_SWR are read-only commands the radio answers when asked,
so they are asked for on each poll of a KEYED radio and not at all
otherwise: a receiving station pays nothing for meters nobody is watching.
Both appear next to the S-meter only while transmitting, because showing
them the rest of the time would show the last thing that happened as if it
were now.
An SWR of 0 draws as '—' rather than as 1.0. A perfect match on an antenna
nobody has measured is the one reading an operator should never be handed.
There is no temperature. The protocol's command list has TX_POWER and
TX_SWR and nothing thermal at all — so rather than leave the question
hanging, it is written down where the next person will look for it. A
temperature invented from something else, on a transmitter, is exactly the
kind of number somebody would trust.
The log settles it, and it was not mute. Mute works: '→ mute:0,true;' and
the radio answers 'mute:0,true'. What happens is that the squelch REFUSES
to go off — we send 'sql_enable:0,false;', the radio echoes false, and
eighty milliseconds later announces 'sql_enable:0,true' again. Six times
in the log, always the same shape. The SQL lamp coming back on right after
a MUTE click is that revert landing, not the mute doing it.
So the optimistic hold is fixed rather than the phantom. It was a fixed
1.2 s, which is wrong in both directions: too short for a setting the
radio never echoes at all (AGC), and too long for one it refuses, where it
showed the operator a lie for a second. The requested value now stands
while the radio says nothing about that setting, and the instant the radio
reports any change for it, its word replaces ours. A refusal is therefore
visible immediately, and an unechoed setting still sticks.
Also from the same session: filters per MODE — the narrow end in CW, the
voice widths in SSB, a middle set for the digital modes — because 250 Hz
in SSB and 2.8 kHz in CW are buttons nobody presses. And APF is shown only
in CW: it rings a single tone out of the noise, which is a CW tool and
nothing else.